nly a few people besides ourselves there, and
how I began to count them and stopped when I noticed a sign over the
head of the fifth person--a little woman with a red nose and a pimple on
it, that seemed to be staring at me as much as the grayish-blue eyes
above them, it was so large and round--and tried to read the German,
with the aid of the Russian translation below. I noticed all this and
remembered it, as if there was nothing else in the world for me to think
of--no America, no gendarme to destroy one's passports and speak of two
hundred rubles as if he were a millionaire, no possibility of being sent
back to one's old home whether one felt at all grateful for the
kindness or not--nothing but that most attractive of places, full of
interesting sights.

For, though I had been so hopeful a little while ago, I felt quite
discouraged when a man, very sour and grumbling--and he was a Jew--a
"Son of Mercy" as a certain song said--refused to tell mamma where
Schidorsky lived. I then believed that the whole world must have united
against us; and decided to show my defiant indifference by leaving the
world to be as unkind as it pleased, while I took no interest in such
trifles.

So I let my mind lose itself in a queer sort of mist--a something I
cannot describe except by saying it must have been made up of lazy
inactivity. Through this mist I saw and heard indistinctly much that
followed.

When I think of it now, I see how selfish it was to allow myself to
sink, body and mind, in such a sea of helpless laziness, when I might
have done something besides awaiting the end of that critical time,
whatever it might be--something, though what, I do not see even now, I
own. But I only studied the many notices till I thought myself very well
acquainted with the German tongue; and now and then tried to cheer the
other children, who were still inclined to cry, by pointing out to them
some of the things that interested me. For this faulty conduct I have no
excuse to give, unless youth and the fact that I was stunned with the
shock we had just received, will be accepted.

I remember through that mist that mother found Schidorsky's home at
last, but was told she could not see him till a little later; that she
came back to comfort us, and found there our former fellow passenger who
had come with us from Vilna, and that he was very indignant at the way
in which we were treated, and scolded, and declared he would have the
matter in all