It was on one of the turf benches of this garden that a rosy mouth six years of age improvised the following tale, which was listened to by blue eyes aged four and five years:—
“There were three little cocks who owned a country where there were a great many flowers. They plucked the flowers and put them in their pockets. After that they plucked the leaves and put them in their playthings. There was a wolf in that country; there was a great deal of forest; and the wolf was in the forest; and he ate the little cocks.”
And this other poem:—
There came a blow with a stick. It was Punchinello who bestowed it on the cat. It was not good for her; it hurt her. Then a lady put Punchinello in prison.
It was there that a little abandoned child, a foundling whom the convent was bringing up out of charity, uttered this sweet and heartbreaking saying. She heard the others talking of their mothers, and she murmured in her corner:—
“As for me, my mother was not there when I was born!”
There was a stout portress who could always be seen hurrying through the corridors with her bunch of keys, and whose name was Sister Agatha. The “big big girls”—those over ten years of age—called her Agathocles.
The refectory, a large apartment of an oblong square form, which received no light except through a vaulted cloister on a level with the garden, was dark and damp, and, as the children say, full of beasts. All the places round about furnished their contingent of insects.
Each of its four corners had received, in the language of the pupils, a special and expressive name. There was Spider corner, Caterpillar corner, Woodlouse corner, and Cricket corner.