with his cheek, and there was a warm soft feeling in his soul, as soft as though not only his
hands but his whole soul were lying on the velvet of Seryozha's jacket.
He looked at the boy's big dark eyes, and it seemed to him as though from those wide pupils
there looked out at him his mother and his wife and everything that he had ever loved.
"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? There 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