"They are crafty about everything, setting God at naught; and grandfather, seeing their artfulness, teases them by saying: 'I shall buy Ivan a certificate of exemption so that they won't take him for a soldier. I can't do without him.' This makes them angry; it is just what they don't want; besides, they grudge the money. Exemptions cost money."

I was living with grandmother again, as I had done on the steamer, and every evening before I fell asleep she used to tell me fairy stories, or tales about her life, which were just like a story. But she spoke about family affairs, such as the distribution of the property amongst the children, and grandfather's purchase of a new house, lightly, in the character of a stranger regarding the matter from a distance, or at the most that of a neighbor, rather than that of the person next in importance to the head of the house.

From her I learned that Tsiganok was a foundling; he had been found one wet night in early spring, on a bench in the porch.

"There he lay," said grandmother pensively and mysteriously, "hardly able to cry, for he was nearly numb with cold."

"But why do people abandon children?"

"It is because the mother has no milk, or anything to feed her baby with. Then she hears that a child which has been born somewhere lately is dead, and she goes and leaves her own there."

She paused and scratched her head; then sighing and gazing at the ceiling, she continued:

"Poverty is always the reason, Oleysha; and a kind of poverty which must not be talked about, for an unmarried girl dare not admit that she has a child--people would cry shame upon her.

"Grandfather wanted to hand Vaniushka over to the police, but I said 'No, we will keep him ourselves to fill the place of our dead ones.' For I have had eighteen children, you know. If they had all lived they would have filled a street--eighteen new families! I was married at eighteen, you see, and by this time I had had fifteen children, but God so loved my flesh and blood that He took all of them--all my little babies to the angels, and I was sorry and glad at the same time."

Sitting on the edge of the bed in her nightdress, huge and dishevelled, with her black hair falling about her, she looked like the bear which a bearded woodman from Cergatch had led into our yard not long ago.

Making the sign of the cross on her spotless, snowwhite breast, she laughed softly, always ready to make light of everything.

"It was better for them to be taken, but hard for me to be left desolate, so I was delighted to have Ivanka --but even now I feel the pain of my love for you, my little ones! . . . Well, we kept him, and baptized him, and he still lives happily with us. At first I used to call him 'Beetle,' because he really did buzz sometimes, and went creeping and buzzing through the rooms just like a beetle. You must love him. He is a good soul."

I did love Ivan, and admired him inexpressibly. On Saturday when, after punishing the children for the transgressions of the week, grandfather went to vespers, we had an indescribably happy time in the kitchen.

Tsiganok would get some cockroaches from the stove, make a harness of thread for them with great rapidity, cut out a paper sledge, and soon two pairs of black horses were prancing on the clean, smooth, yellow table. Ivan drove them at a canter, with a thin splinter of wood as a whip, and urged them on, shouting:

"Now they have started for the Bishop's house."

Then he gummed a small piece of paper to the back of one of the cockroaches and sent him to run behind the sledge.

"We forgot the bag," he explained. "The monk drags it with him as he runs. Now then, geeup!"

He tied the feet of another cockroach together with cotton, and as the insect hopped along, with its head thrust forward, he cried, clapping his hands:

"This is the deacon coming out of the wineshop to say vespers."

After this he showed us a mouse which stood up at the word of command, and walked on his hind legs, dragging his long tail behind him and blinking comically with his lively eyes, which were like black glass beads.

He made friends of mice, and used to carry them about in his bosom, and feed them with sugar and kiss them.

"Mice are clever creatures," he used to say in a tone of conviction. "The house-goblin is very fond of them, and whoever feeds them will have all his wishes granted by the old hob-goblin."

He could do conjuring tricks with cards and coins too, and he used to shout louder than any of the children; in fact, there was hardly any difference between them and him. One day when they were playing cards with him they made him "booby" several times in succession, and he was very much offended. He stuck his lips out sulkily and refused to play any more, and he complained to me afterward, his nose twitching as he spoke:

"It was a put-up job! They were signaling to one another and passing the cards about under the table. Do you call that playing the game? If it comes to trickery I 'm not so bad at it myself."

Yet he was nineteen years old and bigger than all four of us put together.

I have special memories of him on holiday evenings, when grandfather and Uncle Michael went out to see their friends, and curly headed, untidy Uncle Jaakov appeared with his guitar while grandmother prepared tea with plenty of delicacies, and vodka in a square bottle with red flowers cleverly molded in glass on its lower part. Tsiganok shone bravely on these occasions in his holiday attire. Creeping softly and sideways came Gregory, with his colored spectacles gleaming; came Nyanya Eugenia--pimply, red-faced and fat like a Toby-jug, with cunning eyes and a piping voice; came the hirsute deacon from Uspenski, and other dark slimy people bearing a resemblance to pikes and eels. They all ate and drank a lot, breathing hard the while; and the children had wineglasses of sweet syrup given them as a treat, and gradually there was kindled a warm but strange gaiety.

Uncle Jaakov tuned his guitar amorously, and as he did so he always uttered the same words:

"Well, now let us begin!"

Shaking his curly head, he bent over the guitar, stretching out his neck like a goose; the expression on his round, careless face became dreamy, his passionate, elusive eyes were obscured in an unctuous mist, and lightly touching the chords, he played something disjointed, involuntarily rising to his feet as he played. His music demanded an intense silence. It rushed like a rapid torrent from somewhere far away, stirring one's heart and penetrating it with an incomprehensible sensation of sadness and uneasiness. Under the influence of that music we all became melancholy, and the oldest present felt themselves to be no more than children. We sat perfectly still--lost in a dreamy silence. Sascha Michailov especially listened with all his might as he sat upright beside our uncle, gazing at the guitar open-mouthed, and slobbering with delight. And the rest of us remained as if we had been frozen, or had been put under a spell. The only sound besides was the gentle murmur of the samovar which did not interfere with the complaint of the guitar.

Two small square windows threw their light into the darkness of the autumn night, and from time to time some one tapped on them lightly.