ry is very long and interesting, I will tell it
you in brief.

He has a very distinguished father and a very noble mother, and he is an
only child, of a very frolicsome disposition, on account of which his
father and his mother frequently disagreed; the father used to punish
him and beat him, but the boy hid with his mother. In a word, it came to
this, that his father gave him into the hands of strangers, to be
educated and put into shape. The mother could not do without him, and
fell sick of grief; she became a wreck. Her beautiful house was burnt
long ago through the boy's doing: one day, when a child, he played with
fire, and there was a conflagration, and the neighbors came and built on
the site of her palace, and she, the invalid, lies neglected in a
corner. The father, who has left the house, often wished to rejoin her,
but by no manner of means can they live together without the son, and so
the cast-off child became a "living orphan"; he roams about in the wide
world, comes to a place, and when he has stayed there a little while,
they drive him out, because wherever he comes, he stirs up a commotion.
As is the way with all orphans, he has many fathers, and everyone
directs him, hits him, lectures him; he is always in the way, blamed for
everything, it's always his fault, so that he has got into the habit of
cowering and shrinking at the mere sight of a stick. Wandering about as
he does, he has copied the manners and customs of strange people, in
every place where he has been; his very character is hardly his own. His
father has tried both to threaten and to persuade him into coming back,
saying they would then all live together as before, but Yuedel has got to
like living from home, he enjoys the scrapes he gets into, and even the
blows they earn for him. No matter how people knock him about, pull his
hair, and draw his blood, the moment they want him to make friendly
advances, there he is again, alert and smiling, turns the world
topsyturvy, and won't hear of going home. It is remarkable that Yuedel,
who is no fool, and has a head for business, the instant people look
kindly on him, imagines they like him, although he has had a thousand
proofs to the contrary. He has lately been of such consequence in the
eyes of the world that they have begun to treat him in a new way, and
they drive him out of every place at once. The poor boy has tried his
best to please, but it was no good, they knocked him about till he was