After the grammar, we had a lesson in writing.

That day Mr. Hamel had new copies for us, written in a beautiful round hand -- France, Alsace, France, Alsace.

They looked like little flags floating everywhere in the school-room, hung from the rod at the top of our desks.

You ought to have seen how every one set to work, and how quiet it was!

The only sound was the scratching of the pens over the paper.

Once some beetles flew in; but nobody paid any attention to them, not even the littlest ones, who worked right on tracing their fish-hooks, as if that was French, too.

On the roof the pigeons cooed very low, and I thought to myself, "Will they make them sing in German, even the pigeons?" Whenever I looked up from my writing I saw Mr. Hamel sitting motionless in his chair and gazing first at one thing, then at another, as if he wanted to fix in his mind just how everything looked in that little school-room.

Fancy! For forty years he had been there in the same place, with his garden outside the window and his class in front of him, just like that.

Only the desks and benches had been worn smooth; the walnut-trees in the garden were taller, and the hopvine that he had planted himself twined about the windows to the roof.

How it must have broken his heart to leave it all, poor man; to hear his sister moving about in the room above, packing their trunks!