y.
He was hoisted to the surface of the ground in a large bucket full of
ore. All the first impressions of his sad childhood were intimately
connected with the mine where his mother, who was obliged to earn her
living, always worked. As she had no one to whom to entrust the child,
she took him with her, and he remained lying beside her, fixing his
wide-open eyes on his mother's flickering lamp, while he sucked at his
milk-bottle. It was this black hole which echoed to his laughter and his
crying, especially to the latter. His mother, who was naturally
taciturn, had scarcely time to caress her child, for she would have had
to quit her work; when she heard the little one's sobs, she redoubled
the blows of her pickaxe against the dark mass of coal, as though she
wished by the noise they made to drown the feeble wailing of the infant.

It was in this mine that he grew and made his first experiments in
walking; later on he began to explore, first the narrow passage where
his mother worked at her daily task, then venturing into the other
galleries of this subterranean kingdom. As his mind developed, a whole
world of phantoms created by his imagination rose around him. All these
masses of black earth with their blocks of metal, which had slumbered
for centuries in the depths, seemed to him living beings, and all the
mysterious muffled sounds which came one knew not whence, sounded in his
ears like the groans of victims imprisoned by evil genii in gloomy
caves. For him the water which filtered through the walls of the mine
was a shower of tears, and that which trickled, yellow of tint, across
the ore resembled flowing blood. The darkness was constantly traversed
by vague and ever new apparitions, vanishing as soon as they appeared,
which nevertheless left a trace of their passage on the child's
impressionable mind.

When a miner's song reached him, deadened by distance, it seemed to him
to issue from the depths of the rocks. By dint of practice, his sense of
hearing had acquired a fine subtlety, and sometimes putting his ear to
the rugged walls, he listened with so much attention that he could catch
the faintest unknown and inexplicable sounds. It was perhaps only the
wrathful murmur of some imprisoned spring, but for Ivan it was the groan
of a human being struggling in his dungeon. All the objects round
him--the ore, the rocks, the water--were animated with a life visible
and comprehensible to him alone. These things were not