rer than you all.

"And I despise your books, despise all worldly blessings and wisdom.
Everything is void, frail, visionary and delusive as a mirage. Though
you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the
face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your
history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen
slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.

"You are mad, and gone the wrong way. You take falsehood for truth and
ugliness for beauty. You would marvel if suddenly apple and orange
trees should bear frogs and lizards instead of fruit, and if roses
should begin to breathe the odour of a sweating horse. So do I marvel
at you, who have bartered heaven for earth. I do not want to
understand you.

"That I may show you in deed my contempt for that by which you live, I
waive the two millions of which I once dreamed as of paradise, and
which I now despise. That I may deprive myself of my right to them, I
shall come out from here five minutes before the stipulated term, and
thus shall violate the agreement."

When he had read, the banker put the sheet on the table, kissed the
head of the strange man, and began to weep. He went out of the wing.
Never at any other time, not even after his terrible losses on the
Exchange, had he felt such contempt for himself as now. Coming home,
he lay down on his bed, but agitation and tears kept him a long time
from sleeping...

The next morning the poor watchman came running to him and told him
that they had seen the man who lived in the wing climb through the
window into the garden. He had gone to the gate and disappeared. The
banker instantly went with his servants to the wing and established
the escape of his prisoner. To avoid unnecessary rumours he took the
paper with the renunciation from the table and, on his return, locked
it in his safe.

VANKA

BY ANTON P. CHEKHOV

Nine-year-old Vanka Zhukov, who had been apprentice to the shoemaker
Aliakhin for three months, did not go to bed the night before
Christmas. He waited till the master and mistress and the assistants
had gone out to an early church-service, to procure from his
employer's cupboard a small phial of ink and a penholder with a rusty
nib; then, spreading a crumpled sheet of paper in front of him, he
began to write.

Before, however, deciding to make the first letter, he looked
furtively at the door and at the window, glanced several