During Easter week a peasant went out to see whether the ground was all thawed out. He went into the garden and touched the soil with a stick. The earth was soft. The peasant went into the woods; here the catkins were already swelling on the willows. The peasant thought: "I will fence my garden with willows; they will grow up and will make a good hedge!" He took his ax, cut down a dozen willows, sharpened them at the end, and stuck them in the ground. All the willows sent up sprouts with leaves, and underground let out just such sprouts for roots; and some of them took hold of the ground and grew, and others did not hold well to the ground with their roots, and died and fell down. In the fall the peasant was glad at the sight of his willows: six of them had taken root. The following spring the sheep killed two willows by gnawing at them, and only two were left. Next spring the sheep nibbled at these also. One of them was completely ruined, a...
Still more remarkable were my relations to the children. In my rôle of benefactor, I turned my attention to the children also, being desirous to save these innocent beings from perishing in that lair of vise, and noting them down in order to attend to them afterwards. Among the children, I was especially struck with a twelve-year-old lad named Serozha. I was heartily sorry for this bold, intelligent lad, who had lived with a cobbler, and who had been left without a shelter because his master had been put in jail, and I wanted to do good to him. I will here relate the upshot of my benevolence in his case, because my experience with this child is best adapted to show my false position in the rôle of benefactor. I took the boy home with me and put him in the kitchen. It was impossible, was it not, to take a child who had lived in a den of iniquity in among my own children? And I considered myself very kind...