mbered."

"Oh, but I can manage it," I said as I lifted it up. I verily believe
that if the lumber-room had been a couple of versts away, and the frame
twice as heavy as it was, I should have been the more pleased. I felt
as though I wanted to tire myself out in performing this service for
Nicola. When I returned to the room the bricks and screws had been
replaced on the windowsill, and Nicola was sweeping the debris, as well
as a few torpid flies, out of the open window. The fresh, fragrant air
was rushing into and filling all the room, while with it came also the
dull murmur of the city and the twittering of sparrows in the garden.
Everything was in brilliant light, the room looked cheerful, and a
gentle spring breeze was stirring Nicola's hair and the leaves of my
"Algebra." Approaching the window, I sat down upon the sill, turned my
eyes downwards towards the garden, and fell into a brown study.

Something new to me, something extraordinarily potent and unfamiliar,
had suddenly invaded my soul. The wet ground on which, here and there,
a few yellowish stalks and blades of bright-green grass were to be seen;
the little rivulets glittering in the sunshine, and sweeping clods of
earth and tiny chips of wood along with them; the reddish twigs of the
lilac, with their swelling buds, which nodded just beneath the window;
the fussy twitterings of birds as they fluttered in the bush below; the
blackened fence shining wet from the snow which had lately melted off
it; and, most of all, the raw, odorous air and radiant sunlight--all
spoke to me, clearly and unmistakably, of something new and beautiful,
of something which, though I cannot repeat it here as it was then
expressed to me, I will try to reproduce so far as I understood it.
Everything spoke to me of beauty, happiness, and virtue--as three things
which were both easy and possible for me--and said that no one of them
could exist without the other two, since beauty, happiness, and virtue
were one. "How did I never come to understand that before?" I cried to
myself. "How did I ever manage to be so wicked? Oh, but how good, how
happy, I could be--nay, I WILL be--in the future! At once, at once--yes,
this very minute--I will become another being, and begin to live
differently!" For all that, I continued sitting on the window-sill,
continued merely dreaming, and doing nothing. Have you ever, on a
summer's day, gone to bed in dull, rainy weather, and, waking just
at sunset,