ar as to crack rude jests at
his expense. For instance, as he would be skipping along, with his
childish voice raised in his little ditty, some idler or another would
shout from a window, or through the cranny of a fence:

"Hi, Nilushka! Fire! Fire!"

Whereupon the angel-faced imbecile would sink to earth as though his
legs had been cut away at the knee from under him, and he would huddle,
frantically clutching his golden head in his permanently soiled hands,
and exposing his youthful form to the dust, under the nearest house or
fence.

Only then would the person who had given him the fright repent, and say
with a laugh:

"God in heaven, what a stupid lad this is!"

And, should that person have been asked why he had thus terrified the
boy, he would probably have replied:

"Because it is such sport to do so. As a lad who cannot feel things as
other human beings do, he inclines folk to make fun of him."

As for the omniscient Antipa Vologonov, the following was his frequent
comment on Nilushka:

"Christ also had to walk in terror. Christ also was persecuted. Why so?
Because ever He endured in rectitude and strength. Men need to learn
what is real and what is unreal. Many are the sins of earth come of the
fact that the seeming is mistaken for the actual, and that men keep
pressing forward when they ought to be waiting, to be proving
themselves."

Hence Vologonov, like the rest, bestowed much attention upon Nilushka,
and frequently held conversations with him.

"Do you now pray to God," he said once as he pointed to heaven with one
of his crooked fingers, and with the disengaged hand clasped his
dishevelled, variously coloured beard.

Whereupon Nilushka glanced fearfully at the mysteriously pointing
finger, and, plucking sharply at his forehead, shoulders, and stomach
with two fingers and a thumb, intoned in thin, plaintive accents:

"Our Father in Heaven--"

"WHICH ART in Heaven."

"Yes, in the Heaven of Heavens."

"Ah, well! God will understand. He is the friend of all blessed ones."
[Idiots; since persons mentally deficient are popularly deemed to stand
in a peculiarly close relation to the Almighty.]

Again, great was Nilushka's interest in anything spherical. Also, he
had a love for handling the heads of children; when, softly approaching
a group from behind, he would, with his bright, quiet smile, lay
slender, bony fingers upon a close-cropped little poll; with the result
that the children, not