Then Oblomov’s nurse proceeded to draw another picture for the imagination of her charge. That is to say, she told him of the exploits of the Russian Achilleses and Ulysseses, and of the manner in which those heroes had been used to wander about Russia, and to kill and slay; and of how once they had disputed as to which of them could best drain a beaker of wine at a draught. Also, she told the boy of cruel robbers, of sleeping princesses, and of cities and peoples which had been turned into stone. Lastly, she passed to Russian demonology, to dead folk, to monsters, and to werewolves. With a simplicity, yet a sincerity, worthy of Homer, with a lifelike similitude of detail and a power of clear-cut relief that might have vied with the great Greek poet’s, she fired the boy’s intellect and imagination to a love for that Iliad which our heroes founded during the dim ages when man had not yet become adapted to the sundry perils and mysteries of nature and of life--when still he trembled before werewolves and wood demons, and sought refuge with protectors like Alesha Popovitch from the calamities which surrounded him--when air and water and forest and held alike were under the continued sway of the supernatural. Truly, the life of a mortal of those days must have been full of fear and trembling, seeing that, should he but cross his threshold, he stood in danger of being devoured by a wild beast, or of having his throat cut by a brigand, or of being despoiled of his all by a Tartar, or of disappearing from human ken without trace left! Again, celestial portents would be seen in the shape cf pillars and balls of fire, while over a freshly made grave a light would glow, and some one would seem to be walking through the forest with a lantern, and laughing horribly, and flashing bright eyes amid the gloom: And in man’s own personality much that passed his understanding would also take shape and materialize. No matter how long or how righteously a man might have lived, he would suddenly start babbling, or shout aloud in a voice not his own, or go wandering o’ nights in a trance, or involuntarily begin beating and assaulting his fellows. And just at the moment when such things happened a hen would crow like a cock, and a raven would croak from the gable! Consequently feeble mankind, peering tremblingly at life, sought in its own imagination, its own nature, a key to the mysteries which surrounded it: and it may be that the immobility, the inertia, the absence of all active passion or incident or peril which such a retired existence imposed upon man led him to create, in the midst of the world of nature, another and an impossible world, in which he found comfort and relief for his idle intellect, explanations of the more ordinary’ sequences of events, and extraneous solutions of extraordinary phenomena. In fact, our poor forefathers lived by instinct. Neither wholly giving rein to nor wholly restraining their