When the Easter term approached its end in May I began to think of my summer vacation. I needed one. Seven months of steady drilling under Routh, supplemented by extra reading prescribed by him, and also by the reading of Maxwell’s inspiring books, had produced results with which I was satisfied, and so was Mr. Niven, my Trinity College mentor. I certainly did not feel any more like a goose wandering in a fog; I saw much light ahead, and felt much more confident that I saw the goal for which I was steering. But my pitch was very high and I needed de-tuning. I finally decided to visit some little place in France and selected Pornic, on the French Atlantic coast, in the department called Loire Inférieure. I knew nothing about it except what I had read in Baedeker, but it looked to me like a quiet little place where in addition to complete change of scene I should have a good chance to learn French. The names of Laplace, La Grange, and Ampère were mentioned so often and with so much veneration by Maxwell, that I felt ashamed of my ignorance of the language of France. Pornic was only a day’s journey from Cambridge, and off I went with no other books in my bag beside Campbell’s “Life of Maxwell” and a French grammar. The Pornic landlady was not up to the standard of my Cambridge landlady, but I did not complain nor make any invidious comparisons; the English were not very popular in those days on the Atlantic coast of France, where the oldest fishermen had not yet forgotten the operations of the English fleet during the Napoleonic wars. I was the only stranger in town, and when it became known that I was an American who had come to Pornic to study the language of France the village was mine. I engaged the village schoolmaster to give me French conversation lessons. I met him in his garden every evening and we talked to our hearts’ content. He was a most entertaining little fellow, with a bald head, a red nose, and a big snuff-box to which he appealed very frequently for a fresh supply of interesting topics of conversation. He boasted among the villagers that his reputation as a French scholar had reached the United States and, _voilà_, had brought me to Pornic. I never denied it, but on the contrary I often walked through the village streets with the good old _maître d’école_ and listened most attentively to his French accents as if they were the rarest pearls of wisdom.