The same freshness of impression and the same affinity for natural objects will be found in another recollection of the same period: the recollection of “a certain harmonica,” whose music to the “ear of a child of six” sounded as sweet and strange as that of the frog whom he heard emitting his limpid note in the neighbourhood of the solitary farm as the last light of evening faded from the heights. “A series of glass slips, of unequal length, fixed upon two tightly-stretched tapes, and a cork on the end of a wire, which served as a striker”: such was the instrument which some one brought the child from the latest fair. “Imagine an untutored hand striking at random upon this key-board, with the most riotous unexpectedness of octaves, discords, and inverted harmonies”: such was the chiming of the bell-ringer frogs on the sunken lanes of Malaval. “As a song it had neither head nor tail; but the purity of the sound was delightful.” How much more delightful, in the first radiance of his spontaneous childhood, this little scrap of a fellow who was beginning to play his part in the great concert of the world, in which he was one day to fill so notable a place and to sing a new song to the glory of the Master of Nature! [13] CHAPTER III THE SCHOOLBOY: SAINT-LÉONS With his seventh year the time came for him to go to school. The schoolmaster of Saint-Léons was the child’s godfather. Everything pointed to him as the child’s first teacher. So Jean-Henri left the ancestral home at Malaval to return to his father’s house at Saint-Léons and attend the local school, which was kept by his godfather, Pierre Ricard. He could not have done better as a start in life. Let us leave him to paint one picture of this second phase of his life. He begins with a description of the school: What shall I call the room in which I was to become acquainted with the alphabet? It would be difficult to find the exact word, because the room served for every purpose. It was at once a school, a kitchen, a bedroom, a dining-room, and, at times, a chicken-house and a piggery. Palatial schools were not dreamt of in those days; any wretched hovel was thought good enough. A broad fixed ladder led to the floor above. Under the ladder stood a big bed in a boarded recess. What was there upstairs? I never quite knew. I would see the master sometimes bring down an armful of hay for the ass, sometimes a basket of potatoes which the housewife emptied into the pot in which the little porker’s food was cooked. It must have been a loft of sorts, a store-house of provisions for man and beast. Those two apartments composed the whole building.