On recovering from the effects of this accident he was apprenticed by his kinsfolk to a draughtsman, who treated him so harshly that he ran away, becoming first an assistant to an ikon-maker, and then a turnspit on a steamer on the Volga. Here he met with an unexpected piece of good luck. His new master, the cook on board the steamer, Smurny by name, happened to be a lettered man of superior ability, and he proved to be one of the best friends young Pyeshkov ever had. But for him, indeed, modern Russian Literature in all probability would now have been minus of one of its chief ornaments. Smurny awakened within the lad a love of literature, and placed at his disposal his own little library, a miscellaneous collection enough, in which fantastic lives of the Greek Orthodox Saints and interminable treatises on Freemasonry lay cheek by jowl; it was, however, an inestimable boon to Aleksyei, and it included, at any rate, the works of one indisputable European classic--Gogol--besides some of the novels of Alexandre Dumas. Pyeshkov himself, in his fragmentary autobiography, insinuates that his chance encounter with the cultured cook was a turning-point in his career. "Till the advent of the cook," says he, "I could not endure books, or, indeed, any sort of printed paper--passports included." Why he quitted Smurny we are not told; but we do know that when he left the steamer to become a gardener's assistant, he pursued his studies whenever and wherever he had the chance. At the age of fifteen, indeed, his thirst for learning induced him to present himself at the gates of the University of Kazan, the great Volgan seminary, where Tolstoi had been educated forty years earlier, in the naïve belief that instruction of all sorts was to be had there by anyone for the simple asking. "I was mistaken, it appeared," he observes with pathetic sarcasm, "so I entered a biscuit factory at three roubles (6_s._) a month." He has related his experiences of this grinding slavery in a subterranean "stone cage" in that powerful story, "Twenty-Six of Us and one Other."[1] "It was a grievous evil life we lived within those thick walls.... We rose at five o'clock in the morning without having had our sleep out, and--stupid and indifferent--at six o'clock we were sitting at the table to make biscuits from dough already prepared for us by our comrades while we were still sleeping.... Our master called us niggers, and gave us rotten entrails for dinner instead of butcher's meat." No wonder he calls this drudgery "the hardest work I ever experienced."