o one was discovered that night. Among the many square spaces which
could give shelter, Nikolai, with a certain inborn instinct, had chosen
the foremost and most unsuspicious looking one, which stood half built
with a sloping plank-roof over it. There he lay wedged into the farthest
corner, close wrapped in the happy Nirvana of self-forgetfulness--school
zero, and Mrs. Holman a cipher--his body bent down over his knees, his
coat pulled up about his neck to keep out the drips, and his boots down
in the wet mud.

But that night under the wet sky, with Trondsen's planks for his
bed-posts, brought something new into his mind, a feeling--showing
certainly the greatest insensibility to all Mrs. Holman's solicitous
care--that the timber-yard was really his home, a certain independent,
free savage's consciousness in relation to everything that they might
afterwards think fit to screw him into, the school no less than Mrs.
Holman's cellar steps; the planks in the timber-yard shone so white in
bright weather, and when it grew dark, they stood there like his
oft-tried, secret friends, who could screen him from the terrors at
home.

He was taken to school, however, and one of his first timid, inquiring
glances was to discover the thrashing-block with which Mrs. Holman had
threatened him. He had pictured it to himself giving blow after blow
with a rod, and beating incessantly, like the chicory factory at the
bottom of the square.

Strangely enough there was no such block. But there were other things
into which he was to be squeezed and forced like a last into a boot; and
he was a hard last, which often would not go farther than the leg, and
had to be hammered and knocked the rest of the way, where others more
pliable glided smoothly down like eels.

There were things he understood, and things he did not understand. The
former did not often happen to be explained to him, the latter he did
not understand however many explanations were given; the result was a
painful consciousness, a continual difference or falling short both in
relation to his lessons and his teachers, which had to be adjusted by
the cane and detention, while the majority of his schoolmates, in this
particular also, more supple, worked themselves out like true virtuosi.

But what was even a whole day at school, with its full measure of
misfortunes, in comparison to the endlessly long, dull hours of the
evening, when Mrs. Holman, with her own eyes, "watched over h