e dared not; and besides she had no practical need of this.
In vain did Lichonin try to transfer her to a digital system. Nothing
came of this, save that he flew into a rage, yelled at Liubka; while
she would look at him in silence, with astonished, widely open and
guilty eyes, the lashes of which stuck into long black arrows from
tears. Also, through a capricious turn of her mind, she began to master
addition and multiplication with comparative ease, but subtraction and
division were for her an impenetrable wall. But then, she could, with
amazing speed and wit, solve all possible jocose oral head-breaking
riddles, and even remembered very many of them herself from the
thousand year old usage of the village. Toward geography she was
perfectly dull. True, she could orientate herself as to the four
cardinal points on the street, in the garden, and in the room; hundreds
of times better than Lichonin--the ancient peasant instinct in her
asserted itself--but she stubbornly denied the sphericity of the earth
and did not recognize the horizon; and when she was told that the
terrestrial globe moves in space, she only snorted from laughter.
Geographical maps to her were always an incomprehensible daubing in
several colours; but separate figures she memorized exactly and
quickly. "Where's Italy?" Lichonin would ask her. "Here it is, a boot,"
Liubka would say and triumphantly jabbed the Apennine Peninsula.
"Sweden and Norway?" "This dog, which is jumping off a roof." "The
Baltic Sea?" "A widow standing on her knees." "The Black Sea?" "A
shoe." "Spain?" "A fatty in a cap" ... &c. With history matters went no
better; Lichonin did not take into consideration the fact that she,
with her childlike soul thirsting for fiction, would have easily become
familiarized with historic events through various funny and heroically
touching anecdotes; but he, accustomed to pulling through examinations
and tutoring high-school boys of the fourth or fifth grade, starved her
on names and dates. Besides that, he was very impatient, unrestrained,
irascible; grew fatigued soon, and a secret--usually concealed but
constantly growing--hatred for the girl who had so suddenly and
incongruously warped all his life, more and more frequently and
unjustly broke forth during the time of these lessons.

A far greater success as a pedagogue enjoyed Nijeradze. His guitar and
mandolin always hung in the dining room, secured to the nails with
ribbons. The guitar, with