the Reaumur thermometer and author of "Memoires pour servir a
l'histoire naturelle des insectes."--Translator's Note.) devoted one
of his papers to the story of the Chalicodoma of the Walls, whom he
calls the Mason-bee. I propose to go on with the story, to complete it
and especially to consider it from a point of view wholly neglected by
that eminent observer. And, first of all, I am tempted to tell how I
made this Bee's acquaintance.

It was when I first began to teach, about 1843. I had left the normal
school at Vaucluse some months before, with my diploma and all the
simple enthusiasm of my eighteen years, and had been sent to
Carpentras, there to manage the primary school attached to the
college. It was a strange school, upon my word, notwithstanding its
pompous title of 'upper'; a sort of huge cellar oozing with the
perpetual damp engendered by a well backing on it in the street
outside. For light there was the open door, when the weather
permitted, and a narrow prison-window, with iron bars and lozenge
panes set in lead. By way of benches there was a plank fastened to the
wall all round the room, while in the middle was a chair bereft of its
straw, a black-board and a stick of chalk.

Morning and evening, at the sound of the bell, there came rushing in
some fifty young imps who, having shown themselves hopeless dunces
with their Cornelius Nepos, had been relegated, in the phrase of the
day, to 'a few good years of French.' Those who had found mensa too
much for them came to me to get a smattering of grammar. Children and
strapping lads were there, mixed up together, at very different
educational stages, but all incorrigibly agreed to play tricks upon
the master, the boy master who was no older than some of them, or even
younger.