"Where is your schoolmaster?"
"At Liége."
Horace ached to add that he was probably aiding in the defense of the forts but thought that such a statement might bring vengeance on the school, and so he desisted.
"But where is the schoolmaster who is teaching you now?"
"In his chair!" replied Horace, a trifle defiantly.
The officer strode in, followed by six of his men. He clanked up to the chair and read the word on the placard. With a German oath he tore it off, threw it on the floor and ground it under his heel. Then he picked up a piece of chalk and wrote heavily on the blackboard the word:
DEUTSCHLAND
"There," he said. "That is your master now!"
Jacques Oopsdiel, the little lad, who was known throughout the village for his obstinate Holland ways, slipped off his chair. Without a word to any one, in absolute disregard of the German officer and the six soldiers, he took the sponge and erased the offending word.
"M. Maubin said before he went away," he declared in his high-pitched childish voice, "that no one was to write on the blackboard without his permission."