Life at my College is more or less cloistered. In return for a modest payment, most of us masters are lodged in the building; and we take our meals at the principal’s table. The science-master, who is the big gun of the staff and lives in the town, has nevertheless, like ourselves, his own two cells, in addition to a balcony, or leads, where the chemical preparations give forth their suffocating gases in the open air. For this reason, he finds it more convenient to hold his class here during the greater part of the year. The boys come to these rooms in winter, in front of a grate stuffed full of coke, like mine, and there find a blackboard, a pneumatic trough, a mantelpiece covered with glass receivers, panoplies of bent tubes on the walls and, lastly, a certain cupboard in which I remember seeing a row of books, the oracles consulted by the master in the course of his lessons. “Among those books,” said I to myself, “there is sure to be one on algebra. To ask the owner for the loan of it does not appeal to me. My amiable colleague would receive me superciliously and laugh at my ambitious aims. I am sure he would refuse my request.” I decide to help myself to the book which I should never get by asking. This is the half-holiday. The science-master will not put in an appearance to-day; and the key of my room is practically the same as his. I go, with eyes and ears on the alert. My key does not quite fit; it sticks a little, then goes in; and an extra effort makes it turn in the lock. The door opens. I inspect the cupboard and find that it does contain an algebra book, one of the big, fat books which men used to write in those days, a book nearly half a foot thick. My legs give way beneath me. You poor specimen of a housebreaker, suppose you were caught at it! However, all goes well. Quick, let’s lock the door again, and hurry back to our own quarters with the pilfered volume. A chapter catches my attention in the middle of the volume; it is headed, Newton’s Binomial Theorem. The title allures me. What can a binomial theorem be, especially one whose author is Newton, the great English mathematician who weighed the worlds? What has the mechanism of the sky to do with this? Let us read and seek for enlightenment. With my elbows on the table and my thumbs behind my ears, I concentrate all my attention.