Our common fare, as the reader has now seen, was sorry enough; but we had our Carnival and gala days as well as our Lent. Vater Pestalozzi's birthday, in summer, and the first day of the new year, were the most conspicuous. On each of these occasions we enjoyed a whole week's holiday; and as these were also the periods for slaughtering the pigs, we fed (twice a-year for a whole week!) upon black puddings and pork _à discretion_, qualified with a sauce of beetroot and vinegar, and washed down with a fluid really like small-beer.
The school-rooms, which lay immediately under the dormitories on the ground-floor, consisted of a number of detached chambers, each of which issued upon a corridor. They were airy--there was plenty of air at Yverdun--and lofty as became so venerable a building; but they were unswept, unscrubbed, peeled of their paint, and, owing to the little light that could find its way through two very small windows punched out of the fortress walls, presented, save at mid-day, or as the declining sun illumined momentarily the dark recess, as comfortless a set of interiors as you could well see. It required, indeed, all the elasticity of youth to bear many hours' daily incarceration in such black-holes, without participating in the pervading gloom. Such dismal domiciles were only fit resorts for the myoptic bat, who would occasionally visit them from the old tower; for the twilight horde of cockroaches, which swarmed along the floor, or the eight-eyed spiders who colonised the ceiling. The tender sight, too, of a patient just recovering from ophthalmia would here have required no factitious or deeper shade--but merits like these only rendered them as ungenial as possible to the physiology and feelings of their youthful occupants. If these apartments looked gloomy in their dilapidations and want of sun, the sombre effect was much heightened by the absence of the ordinary tables and chairs, and whatever else is necessary to give a room a habitable appearance. Had an appraiser been commissioned to make out a complete list of the furniture and the fixtures together, a mere glance had sufficed for the inventory. In vain would his practised eye have wandered in quest of themes for golden sentences, printed in such uncial characters that all who run may read; in vain for the high-hung well-backed chart, or for any pleasing pictorial souvenirs of Æsop or the Ark--neither these nor the long "coloured Stream of Time," nor formal but useful views in perspective, adorned our sorry walls. No old mahogany case clicked in a corner, beating time for the class, and the hour up-striking loud that it should not be defrauded of its dues. No glazed globe, gliding round on easy axis, spun under its brassy equator to the antipodes on its sides being touched. No bright zodiac was there to exhibit its cabalistic figures in pleasing arabesques. In place of these and other well-known objects, here stood a line of dirty, much-inked desks, with an equally dirty row of attendant forms subjacent alongside. There was a scantling--it seldom exceeded a leash--of rickety rush-bottom chairs distributed at long intervals along the walls; a coal-black slate, pegged high on its wooden horse; a keyless cupboard, containing the various implements of learning, a dirty duster, a pewter plate with cretaceous deposits, a slop-basin and a ragged sponge;--and then, unless he had included the cobwebs of the ceiling, (not usually reckoned up in the furniture of a room,) no other movables remained. One conspicuous fixture, however, there was, a gigantic Dutch stove. This lumbering parallelogram, faggot-fed from the corridor behind, projected several feet into the room, and shone bright in the glaze of earthenware emblazonments. Around it we would sometimes congregate in the intervals of class: in winter to toast our hands and hind quarters, as we pressed against the heated tiles, with more or less vigour according to the fervency of the central fire; and in summer either to tell stories, or to con over the pictorial History of the Bible, which adorned its frontispiece and sides. We cannot say that every square exactly squared with even our schoolboy notions of propriety in its mode of teaching religious subjects; there was a Dutch quaintness in the illustrations, which would sometimes force a smile from its simplicity, at others shock, from its apparent want of decorum and reverence. Preeminent of course among the gems from Genesis, Adam and Eve, safe in innocency and "_naked_ truth," here walked unscathed amidst a menagerie of wild beasts--_there_, dressed in the costume of their fall, they quitted Eden, and left it in possession of tigers, bears, and crocodiles.