opened your eyes and seen through the square space of the
window--the space where the linen blind is blowing up and down, and
beating its rod upon the window-sill--the rain-soaked, shadowy, purple
vista of an avenue of lime-trees, with a damp garden path lit up by the
clear, slanting beams of the sun, and then suddenly heard the joyous
sounds of bird life in the garden, and seen insects flying to and fro at
the open window, and glittering in the sunlight, and smelt the fragrance
of the rain-washed air, and thought to yourself, "Am I not ashamed to be
lying in bed on such an evening as this?" and, leaping joyously to your
feet, gone out into the garden and revelled in all that welter of
life? If you have, then you can imagine for yourself the overpowering
sensation which was then possessing me.

III. DREAMS

"To-day I will make my confession and purge myself of every sin," I
thought to myself. "Nor will I ever commit another one." At this point I
recalled all the peccadilloes which most troubled my conscience. "I will
go to church regularly every Sunday, as well as read the Gospel at the
close of every hour throughout the day. What is more, I will set aside,
out of the cheque which I shall receive each month after I have gone
to the University, two-and-a-half roubles" (a tenth of my monthly
allowance) "for people who are poor but not exactly beggars, yet without
letting any one know anything about it. Yes, I will begin to look out
for people like that--orphans or old women--at once, yet never tell a
soul what I am doing for them.

"Also, I will have a room here of my very own (St. Jerome's, probably),
and look after it myself, and keep it perfectly clean. I will never let
any one do anything for me, for every one is just a human being like
myself. Likewise I will walk every day, not drive, to the University.
Even if some one gives me a drozhki [Russian phaeton.] I will sell
it, and devote the money to the poor. Everything I will do exactly and
always" (what that "always" meant I could not possibly have said, but at
least I had a vivid consciousness of its connoting some kind of
prudent, moral, and irreproachable life). "I will get up all my lectures
thoroughly, and go over all the subjects beforehand, so that at the
end of my first course I may come out top and write a thesis. During my
second course also I will get up everything beforehand, so that I may
soon be transferred to the third course, and at eighteen c