If the head mistress of the academy had herself played dragon at his classes, all would have gone well. He would have made his pupils conjugate irregular verbs, rendered them adepts in the mysteries of the past participle and the subjunctive mood, and turned them out quite innocent of the idiomatic quaintnesses of the French tongue. But _dis aliter visum_. The gods always saw wrong-headedly otherwise in the case of Aristide. A weak-minded governess--and in a governess a sense of humour and of novelty is always a sign of a weak mind--played dragon during Aristide's lessons. She appreciated his method, which was colloquial. The colloquial Aristide was jocular. His lessons therefore were a giggling joy from beginning to end. He imparted to his pupils delicious knowledge. _En avez-vous des-z-homards? Oh, les sales bêtes, elles ont du poil aux pattes_, which, being translated, is: "Have you any lobsters? Oh, the dirty animals, they have hair on their feet"--a catch phrase which, some years ago, added greatly to the gaiety of Paris, but in which I must confess to seeing no gleam of wit--became the historic property of the school. He recited to them, till they were word-perfect, a music-hall ditty of the early 'eighties--_Sur le bi, sur le banc, sur le bi du bout du banc_, and delighted them with dissertations on Mme. Yvette Guilbert's earlier repertoire. But for him they would have gone to their lives' end without knowing that _pognon_ meant money; _rouspétance_, assaulting the police; _thune_, a five-franc piece; and _bouffer_, to take nourishment. He made (according to his own statement) French a living language. There was never a school in Great Britain, the Colonies, or America on which the Parisian accent was so electrically impressed. The retort, _Eh! ta soeur_, was the purest Montmartre; also _Fich'-moi la paix, mon petit_, and _Tu as un toupet, toi_; and the delectable locution, _Allons étrangler un perroquet_ (let us strangle a parrot), employed by Apaches when inviting each other to drink a glass of absinthe, soon became current French in the school for invitations to surreptitious cocoa-parties.