bitterness.

"One day," Gorky tells us, "I was warming some water for him; the
bowl fell, and I burned my hands badly. That evening I ran away, my
grandfather having scolded me severely. I then became a painter's
apprentice."

He did not remain long in this position. From this time on, his
unsatisfied soul was seized with the "wanderlust." First apprenticed
to an engraver, and then as a gardener, he finally became a scullion
on one of the boats that plies up and down the Volga. Here he felt
more at ease.

On board, in the person of the master-cook, named Smoury, he
unexpectedly met a teacher. This cook, who had been a soldier, loved
to read, and he gave the child all the books that he had in an old
trunk. They consisted of the works of Gogol, Dumas' novels, the
"Lives of the Saints," a manual of geography, and some popular
novels. Surely, a queer collection!

Smoury inspired his scullion, then sixteen years of age, "with an
ardent curiosity for the printed word." A "furious" desire to learn
seized the young fellow; he went to Kazan, a university city, in the
hope of "learning gratuitously all sorts of beautiful things." Cruel
deception! They explained to him that "this was not according to the
established order." Discouraged, a few months later, he took a
position with a baker. He who dreamed of the sun and the open air
had to be imprisoned in a filthy and damp cellar. He remained there
for two years, earning two dollars a month, board and lodging
included; the food, however, was putrid, and his lodging consisted
of an attic which he shared with five other men.

"My life in that bakery," he has said, "left a bitter impression.
Those two years were the hardest of my whole life." He has thus
described his recollections in one of his stories:

"We lived in a wooden box, under a low and heavy ceiling, all
covered with cobwebs and permeated with fine soot. Night pressed us
between the two walls, spattered with spots of mud and all mouldy.
We got up at five in the morning and, stupid and indifferent, began
work at six o'clock. We made bread out of the dough which our
comrades had prepared while we slept. The whole day, from dawn till
ten at night, some of us sat at the table rolling out the dough,
and, to avoid becoming torpid, we would constantly rock ourselves to
and fro while the others kneaded in the flour. The enormous oven,
which resembled a fantastic beast, opened its large jaws, full of
dazzling flames, and