These were my happy days, my true holidays, and my soul already dusty
with the knowledge of life's evil was bathed and refreshed in the
clear-eyed wisdom of child-like thoughts and feelings.

Once, when I was coming out of the city on my way to the fields,
accompanied by a crowd of children we met an unknown little Jewish
boy. He was barefooted and his shirt was torn; his eyebrows were
black, his body slim and his hair grew in curls like that of a little
sheep. He was excited and he seemed to have been crying. The lids of
his dull-black eyes, swollen and red, contrasted with his face, which,
emaciated by starvation, was ghastly pale.

Having found himself face to face with the crowd of children, he stood
still in the middle of the road, burrowing his bare feet in the dust,
which early in the morning is so deliciously cool. In fear, he half
opened the dark lips of his fair mouth,--the next second he leaped
right on to the sidewalk.

"Catch him!" the children started to shout gaily and in a chorus. "A
Jewish boy! Catch the Jew boy!"

I waited, thinking that he would run away. His thin, big-eyed face was
all fear; his lips quivered; he stood there amid the shouts and the
mocking laughter. Pressing his shoulders against the fence and hiding
his hands behind his back, he stretched and strangely appeared to have
grown bigger.

But suddenly he spoke,--very calmly and in a distinct and correct
Russian.

"If you wish,--I will show you some tricks."

I took this offer for a means of self-defence. But the children at
once became interested. The larger and coarser boys alone looked with
distrust and suspicion on the little Jewish boy. The children of our
street were in a state of guerilla warfare with the children of other
streets; in addition, they were deeply convinced of their own
superiority and were loath to brook the rivalry of other children.

The smaller boys approached the matter more simply.

"Come on, show us," they shouted.

The handsome, slim boy moved away from the fence, bent his thin body
backward, and touching the ground with his hands, he tossed up his
feet and remained standing on his arms, shouting:

"Hop! Hop! Hop!"

Then he began to spin in the air, swinging his body lightly and
adroitly. Through the holes of his shirt and pants we caught glimpses
of the greyish skin of his slim body, of his sharply bulging and
angular shoulder-blades, knees and elbows. It seemed to us as if with
one more twis