vice, and noting them down in order to attend to them AFTERWARDS.

Among the children, I was especially struck with a twelve-year-old
lad named Serozha. I was heartily sorry for this bold, intelligent
lad, who had lived with a cobbler, and who had been left without a
shelter because his master had been put in jail, and I wanted to do
good to him.

I will here relate the upshot of my benevolence in his case, because
my experience with this child is best adapted to show my false
position in the role of benefactor. I took the boy home with me and
put him in the kitchen. It was impossible, was it not, to take a
child who had lived in a den of iniquity in among my own children?
And I considered myself very kind and good, because he was a care,
not to me, but to the servants in the kitchen, and because not I but
the cook fed him, and because I gave him some cast-off clothing to
wear. The boy staid a week. During that week I said a few words to
him as I passed on two occasions and in the course of my strolls, I
went to a shoemaker of my acquaintance, and proposed that he should
take the lad as an apprentice. A peasant who was visiting me,
invited him to go to the country, into his family, as a laborer; the
boy refused, and at the end of the week he disappeared. I went to
the Rzhanoff house to inquire after him. He had returned there, but
was not at home when I went thither. For two days already, he had
been going to the Pryesnensky ponds, where he had hired himself out
at thirty kopeks a day in some procession of savages in costume, who
led about elephants. Something was being presented to the public
there. I went a second time, but he was so ungrateful that he
evidently avoided me. Had I then reflected on the life of that boy
and on my own, I should have understood that this boy was spoiled