CHAPTER I


His name was Yura.

He was six years old, and the world was to him enormous, alive and
bewitchingly mysterious. He knew the sky quite well. He knew its
deep azure by day, and the white-breasted, half silvery, half golden
clouds slowly floating by. He often watched them as he lay on his
back upon the grass or upon the roof. But he did not know the stars
so well, for he went to bed early. He knew well and remembered only
one star--the green, bright and very attentive star that rises in the
pale sky just before you go to bed, and that seemed to be the only
star so large in the whole sky.

But best of all, he knew the earth in the yard, in the street and in
the garden, with all its inexhaustible wealth of stones, of velvety
grass, of hot sand and of that wonderfully varied, mysterious and
delightful dust which grown people did not notice at all from the
height of their enormous size. And in falling asleep, as the last
bright image of the passing day, he took along to his dreams a bit of
hot, rubbed off stone bathed in sunshine or a thick layer of tenderly
tickling, burning dust.

When he went with his mother to the centre of the city along the
large streets, he remembered best of all, upon his return, the wide,
flat stones upon which his steps and his feet seemed terribly small,
like two little boats. And even the multitude of revolving wheels
and horses' heads did not impress themselves so clearly upon his