My parents were pious people, but as in our childhood they did not wake us for the morning service, there was a night service held in our house every church holiday, as also in the first and last weeks of Lent. As soon as I learned to read, my father made me read at the divine services. To this I owe whatever knowledge of Russian I possess, for, reading the church books, I became acquainted with the Slavic language, without which it is impossible to know Russian. I am thankful to my father for having watched carefully my reading: whenever I began to read indistinctly, he would say to me: “Stop mumbling! or do you imagine God is pleased with your muttering?” But more than that: whenever my father noticed that I did not understand the passage that I had just read, he undertook the labour of explaining it to me,--in short, he showed endless care in my instruction. As he was not able to hire teachers of foreign languages for me, he did not delay, I may say, a day to place me and my brother in the University as soon as it was founded. Now I shall say something of the manner of instruction at our University. Justice demands that I should state at the start that the University of to-day is quite a different thing from what it was in my days. Both the teachers and students are of a different calibre, and however much the school was then subject to severe criticism, it now deserves nothing but praise. I shall relate, as an example, how the examination was conducted in the lower Latin class. The day before the examination we were being prepared. Here is what was done: our teacher came in a caftan that had five buttons, while his vest had only four. This peculiarity surprised me much, and I asked the teacher for the cause of it. “My buttons seem to amuse you,” he said, “but they are the guardians of your honour and of mine: those on the caftan stand for the five declensions, and on the vest for the four conjugations. And now,” he proceeded, as he beat the table with his hand, “be all attentive to what I have to say! When they shall ask you for the declension of some noun, watch what button I am touching: if you see me holding the second button, answer boldly ‘The second declension.’ Do similarly in regard to the conjugations, being guided by the buttons on my vest, and you will never make a mistake.” That is the kind of an examination we had!