Nothing dashed by the fiasco of his poetry competition, the schoolmaster immediately instituted a competition in prose. He told us about M. Jourdain, who talked prose without knowing it, and requested us each to write a short story upon any theme we might choose to select. I produced the story with the same ease and certainty as I had produced the verse. I had no difficulty in finding a plot which satisfied me; it was concerned with a drowning accident at the seaside, and it culminated--with a remorse--less naturalism that even thus early proclaimed the elective affinity between Flaubert and myself--in an inquest. It described the wonders of the deep, and I have reason to remember that it likened the gap between the fin and the side of a fish to a pocket. In this competition I had no competitor. I, alone, had achieved fiction. I watched the master as he read my work, and I could see from his eyes and gestures that he thought it marvellously good for the boy. He spoke to me about it in a tone which I had never heard from him before and never heard again, and then, putting the manuscript in a drawer, he left us to ourselves for a few minutes. "I'll just read it to you," said the big boy of the form, a daring but vicious rascal. He usurped the pedagogic armchair, found the manuscript, rapped the ruler on the desk, and began to read. I protested in vain. The whole class roared with laughter, and I was overcome with shame. I know that I, eleven, cried. Presently the reader stopped and scratched his head; the form waited. "Oh!" he exclaimed. "Fishes have pockets! Fishes have pockets!" The phrase was used as a missile against me for months. The master returned with his assistant, and the latter also perused the tale. "Very remarkable!" he sagely commented--to be sage was his foible, "very remarkable, indeed!" Yet I can remember no further impulse to write a story for at least ten years. Despite this astonishing success, martyrdom, and glory, I forthwith abandoned fiction and went mad on water-colours. [Footnote 1: Written in 1900.] III