of another. It was evident to Alexei Alexandrovich that he did not understand what he was saying, and this irritated him.

He frowned, and began explaining what Seriozha had heard many times before and never could remember, because he understood it too well, just as that `suddenly' is an adverb of manner of action. Seriozha looked with scared eyes at his father, and could think of nothing but whether his father would make him repeat what he had said, as he sometimes did. And this thought so alarmed Seriozha that he now understood nothing. But his father did not make him repeat it, and passed on to the lesson out of the Old Testament. Seriozha recounted the events themselves well enough, but when he had to answer questions as to what certain events prefigured, he knew nothing, though he had already been punished over this lesson. The passage at which he was utterly unable to say anything, and began fidgeting and cutting the table and swinging his chair, was where he had to tell of the patriarchs before the Flood. He did not know one of them, except Enoch, who had been taken up alive to heaven. Last time he had remembered their names, but now he had forgotten them utterly, chiefly because Enoch was the personage he liked best in the whole of the Old Testament, and Enoch's translation to heaven was connected in his mind with a whole long train of thought, in which he became absorbed now while he gazed with fascinated eyes at his father's watch chain and a half-unbuttoned button on his waistcoat.

In death, of which they talked to him so often, Seriozha disbelieved entirely. He did not believe that those he loved could die, above all that he himself would die. That was to him something utterly inconceivable and impossible. But he had been told all men die; he had asked people, indeed, whom he trusted, and they, too, had confirmed it; his old nurse, too, said the same, though reluctantly. But Enoch had not died, and so it followed that everyone did not die. `And why cannot anyone else so serve God and be taken alive to heaven?' thought Seriozha. Bad people - that is, those Seriozha did not like - might die, but the good might all be like Enoch.

`Well, what are the names of the patriarchs?'

`Enoch, Enos-'

`But you have said that already. This is bad. Seriozha, very bad. If you don't try to learn what is most necessary of all for a Christian,' said his father, getting up, `whatever can interest you? I am displeased with you, and Piotr Ignatich' (this was the chief pedagogue) `is displeased with you.... I shall have to punish you.'

His father and his teacher were both displeased with Seriozha, and he certainly did learn his lessons very badly. But still it could not be said he was a stupid boy. On the contrary, he was far cleverer than the boys his teacher held up as examples to Seriozha. In his father's opinion, he did not want to learn what he was taught. In reality he could not learn that. He could not, because the claims of his own soul were more binding on him that those claims his father and his teacher made upon him. Those claims were in opposition, and he was in direct conflict with his governors.

He was nine years old; he was a child; but he knew his own soul, it was precious to him; he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul. His teachers complained that he would not learn, while his soul was brimming over with thirst for knowledge. And he learned from Kapitonich, from his nurse, from Nadinka, from Vassilii Lukich - but not from his teachers. The spring his father and his teachers reckoned upon to turn their mill wheels had long oozed at another place, and its waters did their work there.

His father punished Seriozha by not letting him go to see Nadinka, Lidia Ivanovna's niece; but this punishment turned out happily for Seriozha. Vassilii Lukich was in a good humor, and showed him how to make windmills. The whole evening passed over this work and in dreaming how to make a windmill on which he could turn himself - clutching at the wings or tying himself on and whirling round. Of his mother Seriozha did not think all the evening, but, when he had gone to bed, he suddenly remembered her, and prayed