While going over some passage of the tiresome poem for the next day’s lesson, I would indulge my fancy for another kind of education. I visited the Linnet in her nest, on a juniper-bush standing as high as myself; I watched the Jay picking an acorn on the ground; I came upon the Crayfish, still quite soft after shedding his shell; I made inquiries as to the exact date when the Cockchafers were due; I went in quest of the first full-blown Cuckoo-flower. Plants and animals, that wondrous poem of which a faint echo was beginning to wake in my young brain, made a very pleasant change from the uninspiring alexandrine. The problem of life and that other one, with its dark terrors, the problem of death, at times passed through my mind. It was a fleeting obsession, soon forgotten by the mercurial spirits of youth. Nevertheless, the tremendous question would recur, brought to mind by this incident or that. Passing one day by a slaughter-house, I saw an Ox driven in by the butcher. I have always had an insurmountable horror of blood; when I was a boy, the sight of an open wound affected me so much that I would fall into a swoon, which on more than one occasion nearly cost me my life. How did I screw up courage to set foot in those shambles? No doubt, the dread problem of death urged me on. At any rate, I entered, close on the heels of the Ox. With a stout rope round its horns, wet-muzzled, meek-eyed, the animal moves along as though making for the crib in its stable. The man walks ahead, holding the rope. We enter the hall of death, amid the sickening stench thrown up by the entrails scattered over the ground and the pools of blood. The Ox becomes aware that this is not his stable; his eyes turn red with terror; he struggles; he tries to escape. But an iron ring is there, in the floor, firmly fixed to a stone flag. The man passes the rope through it and hauls. The Ox lowers his head; his muzzle touches the ground. While an assistant keeps him in this position with the rope, the butcher takes a knife with a pointed blade, not at all a formidable knife, hardly larger than the one which I myself carry in my breeches-pocket. For a moment he feels with his fingers at the back of the animal’s neck and then drives in the blade at the chosen spot. The great beast gives a shiver and drops, as though struck by lightning: procumbit humi bos, as we used to say in those days. I fled from the place like one possessed. Afterwards I wondered how it was possible, with a knife almost identical with that which I used for prizing open my walnuts and taking the skin off my chestnuts, with that insignificant blade, to kill an Ox and kill him so suddenly. No gaping wound, no blood spilt, not a bellow from the animal. The man feels with his finger, gives a jab and the thing is done: the Bullock’s legs double up under him.