ness of it in your nose. If you’re the good boy for that day and you answer the questions he gives it to you and lets you eat it there at your desk so that you can eat it in peace with no one to bother you the way they  would  if  you  took  it  into  the  yard. Then  they’d  torment  you, Gimme a piece, gimme a piece, and you’d be lucky to have an inch left for yourself. There are days when the questions are too hard and he torments us by dropping the apple peel into the wastebasket.Then he borrows a boy from another class to take the wastebasket down to the furnace to burn papers and apple peel or he’ll leave it for the charwoman, Nellie Ahearn, to take it all away in her big canvas sack.We’d like to ask Nel- lie to keep the peel for us before the rats get it but she’s weary from cleaning the whole school by herself and she snaps at us, I have other things to be doin’ with me life besides watchin’ a scabby bunch rootin’ around for the skin of an apple. Go ’way. He peels the apple slowly. He looks around the room with the lit- tle smile. He teases us, Do you think, boys, I should give this to the pigeons on the windowsill? We say, No, sir, pigeons don’t eat apples. Paddy Clohessy calls out, ’Twill give them the runs, sir, and we’ll have it on our heads abroad in the yard. Clohessy,you are an omadhaun.Do you know what an omadhaun is? I don’t, sir. It’s the Irish, Clohessy, your native tongue, Clohessy. An omadhaun is a fool, Clohessy.You are an omadhaun.What is he, boys? An omadhaun, sir. Clohessy  says, That’s  what  Mr. O’Dea  called  me, sir, a  diddering omadhaun. He pauses in his peeling to ask us questions about everything in the world and the boy with the best answers wins. Hands up, he says, who is the President of the United States of America? Every hand in the class goes up and we’re all disgusted when he asks a question that any omadhaun would know.We call out, Roosevelt. Then he says,You,Mulcahy,who stood at the foot of the cross when Our Lord was crucified? Mulcahy is slow.The Twelve Apostles, sir. Mulcahy, what is the Irish word for fool? Omadhaun, sir. And what are you, Mulcahy? An omadhaun, sir. 155