cities, or about the sea, to the amazement of his classmates. He had not
learnt it from the teacher or from a book, but he gave a picture of the
place as if he had actually been there.

"You are inventing," a sceptical listener would say. "Vassili Nikitich
never said that."

His companions did not know what to make of him, for his sympathies
changed so often that he had neither constant friends nor constant
enemies. One week he would attach himself to one boy, seek his society,
sit with him, read to him, talk to him and give him his confidence. Then,
for no reason, he would leave him, enter into close relations with
another boy, and then as speedily forget him.

If one of his companions annoyed him he became angry with him and
pursued hostilities obstinately long after the original cause was
forgotten. Then suddenly he would have a friendly, magnanimous impulse,
would carefully arrange a scene of reconciliation, which interested
everyone, himself most of all.

When he was out of school, everyday life attracted him very little; he
cared neither for its gayer side nor its sterner activities. If his
guardian asked him how the corn should be threshed, the cloth milled or
linen bleached, he turned away and went out on to the verandah to look
out on the woods, or made his way along the river to the thicket to
watch the insects at work, or to observe the birds, to see how they
alighted, how they sharpened their beaks. He caught a hedgehog and made
a playmate of it, went out fishing all day long with the village boys,
or listened to the tales about Pugachev told by a half-witted old woman
living in a mud hut, greedily drinking in the most singular of the