fruit are pigeonholed for good and all in my memory.

With an ever watchful eye for animals and plants, the future
observer, the little six-year-old monkey, practiced by himself, all
unawares. He went to the flower, he went to the insect, even as
the large white butterfly goes to the cabbage and the red admiral
to the thistle. He looked and inquired, drawn by a curiosity
whereof heredity did not know the secret. He bore within him the
germ of a faculty unknown to his family; he kept alive a glimmer
that was foreign to the ancestral hearth. What will become of that
infinitesimal spark of childish fancy? It will die out, beyond a
doubt, unless education intervene, giving it the fuel of example,
fanning it with the breath of experience. In that case, schooling
will explain what heredity leaves unexplained. This is what we
will examine in the next chapter.




CHAPTER VI MY SCHOOLING

I am back in the village, in my father's house. I am now seven
years old; and it is high time that I went to school. Nothing
could have turned out better: the master is my godfather. What
shall I call the room in which I was to become acquainted with the
alphabet? It would be difficult to find the exact word, because
the room served for every purpose. It was at once a school, a
kitchen, a bedroom, a dining room and, at times, a chicken house
and a piggery. Palatial schools were not dreamt of in those days;
any wretched hovel was thought good enough.