igible.

And as smiling his gracious smile, the lad's pathetic, legendary figure
flitted past the mouldy buts and cracked fences and riotous beds of
nettles, there would readily recur to the memory, and succeed one
another, visions of some of the finer and more reputable personages of
Russian lore--there would file before one's mental vision, in endless
sequence, men whose biographies inform us how, in fear for their souls,
they left the life of the world, and, hieing them to the forests and
the caves, abandoned mankind for the wild things of nature. And at the
same time would there recur to one's memory poems concerning the blind
and the poor-in particular, the poem concerning Alexei the Man of God,
and all the multitude of other fair, but unsubstantial, forms wherein
Russia has embodied her sad and terrified soul, her humble and
protesting grief. Yet it was a process to depress one almost to the
point of distraction.

Once, forgetting that Nilushka was imbecile, I conceived an
irrepressible desire to talk with him, and to read him good poetry, and
to tell him both of the world's youthful hopes and of my own personal
thoughts.

The occasion happened on a day when, as I was sitting on the edge of
the ravine, and dangling my legs over the ravine's depths, the lad came
floating towards me as though on air. In his hands, with their fingers
as slender as a girl's, he was holding a large leaf; and as he gazed at
it the smile of his clear blue eyes was, as it were, pervading him from
head to foot.

"Whither, Nilushka?" said I.

With a start he raised his head and eyes heavenward. Then timidly he
glanced at the blue shadow of the ravine, and extended to me his leaf,
over the veins of which there was crawling a ladybird.

"A bukan," he observed.

"It is so. And whither are you going to take it?"

"We shall all of us die. I was going to take and bury it."

"But it is alive; and one does not bury things before they are dead."

Nilushka closed and opened his eyes once or twice.

"I should like to sing something," he remarked.

"Rather, do you SAY something."

He glanced at the ravine again--his pink nostrils quivering and
dilating--then sighed as though he was weary, and in all
unconsciousness muttered a foul expression. As he did so I noticed that
on the portion of his neck below his right ear there was a large
birthmark, and that, covered with golden down like velvet, and
resembling in shape a bee, it seemed to