Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/165

 and his toes turned out, wants a good kicking. If only one could hope to see his nose bleed! but alas! these are the laws of the recreation ground: "All violent and dangerous games are forbidden, likewise all games that touch upon gambling, and cries, and songs, and whistling, and, in general, all that resembles disorder of any kind. It is forbidden to fling stones, to communicate with pupils of another division, to lie on the ground, to drag one another about, to fight. And the pupils can never leave the recreation-ground without leave."

If, after that, the reader does not agree with me that it is a fine thing to be a British lad, with his cricket, his football, his occasional black eyes, his surreptitious feeding, his long-drawn accounts with the lemonade and ginger-wine merchant, his chatter, and escapades, I can only advise that misguided individual to send his son with all haste to Stanislas, and let him be turned out in its approved fashion, a first-rate, consummate prig and humbug, a well-mannered, French-speaking young hypocrite, perfected in the art of duplicity and self-repression, who, on the order of the Marist Fathers, only bestows his friendship on those worthy of it—individuals, it is to be hoped, of his own self-conscious, sanctimonious way of thinking. He has been bred to calculate the value of every action and every word, for each leads to punishment or