nerve-centers of the brain, must, when shocked, cause invisible
disturbance to the organs of thought.

Besides these elements of impurity in the atmosphere, there were
lockers in the classrooms in which the boys kept their miscellaneous
plunder--pigeons killed for fete days, or tidbits filched from the
dinner-table. In each classroom, too, there was a large stone slab, on
which two pails full of water were kept standing, a sort of sink,
where we every morning washed our faces and hands, one after another,
in the master's presence. We then passed on to a table, where women
combed and powdered our hair. Thus the place, being cleaned but once a
day before we were up, was always more or less dirty. In spite of
numerous windows and lofty doors, the air was constantly fouled by the
smells from the washing-place, the hairdressing, the lockers, and the
thousand messes made by the boys, to say nothing of their eighty
closely packed bodies. And this sort of _humus_, mingling with the mud
we brought in from the playing-yard, produced a suffocatingly
pestilent muck-heap.

The loss of the fresh and fragrant country air in which he had
hitherto lived, the change of habits and strict discipline, combined
to depress Lambert. With his elbow on his desk and his head supported
on his left hand, he spent the hours of study gazing at the trees in
the court or the clouds in the sky; he seemed to be thinking of his
lessons; but the master, seeing his pen motionless, or the sheet
before him still a blank, would call out:

"Lambert, you are doing nothing!"

This "_you are doing nothing_!" was a pin-thrust that wounded Louis to