oved.

"To think of thrashing him . . ." he mused. "A nice task to devise
a punishment for him! How can we undertake to bring up the young?
In old days people were simpler and thought less, and so settled
problems boldly. But we think too much, we are eaten up by logic
. . . . The more developed a man is, the more he reflects and gives
himself up to subtleties, the more undecided and scrupulous he
becomes, and the more timidity he shows in taking action. How much
courage and self-confidence it needs, when one comes to look into
it closely, to undertake to teach, to judge, to write a thick
book. . . ."

It struck ten.

"Come, boy, it's bedtime," said the prosecutor. "Say good-night and
go."

"No, papa," said Seryozha, "I will stay a little longer. Tell me
something! Tell me a story. . . ."

"Very well, only after the story you must go to bed at once."

Yevgeny Petrovitch on his free evenings was in the habit of telling
Seryozha stories. Like most people engaged in practical affairs,
he did not know a single poem by heart, and could not remember a
single fairy tale, so he had to improvise. As a rule he began with
the stereotyped: "In a certain country, in a certain kingdom," then
he heaped up all kinds of innocent nonsense and had no notion as
he told the beginning how the story would go on, and how it would
end. Scenes, characters, and situations were taken at random,
impromptu, and the plot and the moral came of itself as it were,
with no plan on the part of the story-teller. Seryozha was very
fond of this improvisation, and the prosecutor noticed that the
simpler and the less ingenious the plot, the stronger the impression
it made on the child.

"Listen," he said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. "Once upon a
time, in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, there lived an
old, very old emperor with a long grey beard, and . . . and with
great grey moustaches like this. Well, he lived in a glass palace
which sparkled and glittered in the sun, like a great piece of clear
ice. The palace, my boy, stood in a huge garden, in which there
grew oranges, you know . . . bergamots, cherries . . . tulips,
roses, and lilies-of-the-valley were in flower in it, and birds of
different colours sang there. . . . Yes. . . . On the trees there
hung little glass bells, and, when the wind blew, they rang so
sweetly that one was never tired of hearing them. Glass gives a
softer, tenderer note than metals. . . . Well, what next? Th