The children poured out into the street and fled to the mountain lightly, like feathers in the wind. I walked alongside of their shepherd, and it seemed to me that I had never seen such charming children before. Mikhail and I walked behind them. He gave them orders, crying out to them; but the children refused to listen to him. They jostled, fought and bombarded one another with pine cones, and quarreled. When they were tired they surrounded us, crawled about our feet like beetles, pulled at their teacher's hands, asked him now about the grass, now about the flowers, and he answered each one in a friendly way, as if to an equal. He rose above them like a white sail. The children were all alert, but some of them were more serious and thoughtful than their age warranted. Silent, they kept near their teacher. Later the children again spread themselves out and Mikhail said to me, low: "Are they created only for toil and drunkenness? Each one is a receptacle of a living soul. Each one could hasten the development of the thought which would free us from the bondage of confusion, yet they must travel along the same dark and narrow channel through which the days of their fathers flowed turbidly. They are ordered to work and forbidden to think. Many of them, perhaps all, pledge allegiance to dead strength and serve it. Here lies the source of earth's misery. There is no freedom for the growth of the human soul." He talked while several young boys walked alongside of him and listened to his words. Their attentiveness was amusing. What could these young sprouts of life understand by his words? I remembered my own teacher. He beat the children on the head with a ruler and would come to school drunk. "Life is filled with fear," Mikhail said, "and mutual hatred eats out the soul of man. A hideous life. But only give the children time to develop freely; do not transform them into beasts of burden, and free and alert, they will light up life both from within and without with the exquisite young fire of their proud souls and the great beauty of their eternal activity." Their blond heads, their blue eyes, their red cheeks were around us like live flowers among the dark green pines. The laughter and clear voices of these gay birds rang out--these harbingers of new life. And all this vital beauty would be trampled down by greed! What sense was there in that? A delicate child is born rejoicing. He grows into a beautiful child, and then, as a grown-up man, he swears vulgarly and groans bitterly, beats his wife and drowns his sorrow in vodka. And as an answer to my thought, Mikhail said: "They go on destroying the people--the one and true temple of the living God. And the destroyers themselves sinking in the chaos of the ruins, see their wicked work and cry out, 'Horrible!' They rush hither and thither and whine, 'Where is God?' while they themselves have killed Him."