then all three begin singing in an
undertone.

Grisha stretches out his hand towards the pie, and they give him a
piece of it. He eats it and watches nurse drinking. . . . He wants
to drink too.

"Give me some, nurse!" he begs.

The cook gives him a sip out of her glass. He rolls his eyes, blinks,
coughs, and waves his hands for a long time afterwards, while the
cook looks at him and laughs.

When he gets home Grisha begins to tell mamma, the walls, and the
bed where he has been, and what he has seen. He talks not so much
with his tongue, as with his face and his hands. He shows how the
sun shines, how the horses run, how the terrible stove looks, and
how the cook drinks. . . .

In the evening he cannot get to sleep. The soldiers with the brooms,
the big cats, the horses, the bit of glass, the tray of oranges,
the bright buttons, all gathered together, weigh on his brain. He
tosses from side to side, babbles, and, at last, unable to endure
his excitement, begins crying.

"You are feverish," says mamma, putting her open hand on his forehead.
"What can have caused it?

"Stove!" wails Grisha. "Go away, stove!"

"He must have eaten too much . . ." mamma decides.

And Grisha, shattered by the impressions of the new life he has
just experienced, receives a spoonful of castor-oil from mamma.

OYSTERS

I NEED no great effort of memory to recall, in every detail, the
rainy autumn evening when I stood with my father in one of the more
frequented streets of Moscow, and felt that I was gradually being
overcome by a strange illness. I had no pain at all, but my legs
were giving way under me, the words stuck in my throat, my head
slipped weakly on one side . . . It seemed as though, in a moment,
I must fall down and lose consciousness.

If I had been taken into a hospital at that minute, the doctors
would have had to write over my bed: _Fames_, a disease which is
not in the manuals of medicine.

Beside me on the pavement stood my father in a shabby summer overcoat
and a serge cap, from which a bit of white wadding was sticking
out. On his feet he had big heavy goloshes. Afraid, vain man, that
people would see that his feet were bare under his goloshes, he had
drawn the tops of some old boots up round the calves of his legs.

This poor, foolish, queer creature, whom I loved the more warmly
the more ragged and dirty his smart summer overcoat became, had
come to Moscow, five months before, to look for a job as copy