Project Gutenberg's The Crushed Flower and Other Stories, by Leonid Andreyev

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Title: The Crushed Flower and Other Stories

Author: Leonid Andreyev

Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5779]
Posting Date: March 26, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRUSHED FLOWER AND OTHER ***

Produced by Jarrod Newton

THE CRUSHED FLOWER AND OTHER STORIES

By Leonid Andreyev

Translated by Herman Bernstein

CONTENTS

The Crushed Flower
A Story Which Will Never Be Finished
On the Day of the Crucifixion
The Serpent's Story
Love, Faith and Hope
The Ocean
Judas Iscariot and Others
"The Man Who Found the Truth"

THE CRUSHED FLOWER

CHAPTER I

His name was Yura.

He was six years old, and the world was to him enormous, alive and
bewitchingly mysterious. He knew the sky quite well. He knew its deep
azure by day, and the white-breasted, half silvery, half golden clouds
slowly floating by. He often watched them as he lay on his back upon the
grass or upon the roof. But he did not know the stars so well, for he
went to bed early. He knew well and remembered only one star--the green,
bright and very attentive star that rises in the pale sky just before
you go to bed, and that seemed to be the only star so large in the whole
sky.

But best of all, he knew the earth in the yard, in the street and in the
garden, with all its inexhaustible wealth of stones, of velvety grass,
of hot sand and of that wonderfully varied, mysterious and delightful
dust which grown people did not notice at all from the height of their
enormous size. And in falling asleep, as the last bright image of the
passing day, he took along to his dreams a bit of hot, rubbed off stone
bathed in sunshine or a thick layer of tenderly tickling, burning dust.

When he went with his mother to the centre of the city along the large
streets, he remembered best of all, upon his return, the wide, flat
stones upon which his steps and his feet seemed terribly small, like
two little boats. And even the multitude of revolving wheels and horses'
heads did not impress them