ere
were fountains in the garden. . . . Do you remember you saw a
fountain at Auntie Sonya's summer villa? Well, there were fountains
just like that in the emperor's garden, only ever so much bigger,
and the jets of water reached to the top of the highest poplar."

Yevgeny Petrovitch thought a moment, and went on:

"The old emperor had an only son and heir of his kingdom--a boy
as little as you. He was a good boy. He was never naughty, he went
to bed early, he never touched anything on the table, and altogether
he was a sensible boy. He had only one fault, he used to
smoke. . . ."

Seryozha listened attentively, and looked into his father's eyes
without blinking. The prosecutor went on, thinking: "What next?"
He spun out a long rigmarole, and ended like this:

"The emperor's son fell ill with consumption through smoking, and
died when he was twenty. His infirm and sick old father was left
without anyone to help him. There was no one to govern the kingdom
and defend the palace. Enemies came, killed the old man, and destroyed
the palace, and now there are neither cherries, nor birds, nor
little bells in the garden. . . . That's what happened."

This ending struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as absurd and naive, but the
whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha. Again his eyes
were clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute
he looked pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a
sinking voice:

"I am not going to smoke any more. . . ."

When he had said good-night and gone away his father walked up and
down the room and smiled to himself.

"They would tell me it was the influence of beauty, artistic form,"
he meditated. "It may be so, but that's no comfort. It's not the
right way, all the same. . . . Why must morality and truth never
be offered in their crude form, but only with embellishments,
sweetened and gilded like pills? It's not normal. . . . It's
falsification . . . deception . . . tricks . . . ."

He thought of the jurymen to whom it was absolutely necessary to
make a "speech," of the general public who absorb history only from
legends and historical novels, and of himself and how he had gathered
an understanding of life not from sermons and laws, but from fables,
novels, poems.

"Medicine should be sweet, truth beautiful, and man has had this
foolish habit since the days of Adam . . . though, indeed, perhaps
it is all natural, and ought to be so. . . . There are many dec