He was marvelously fitted to dispel the disappointment that was felt about the people. Himself one of the people, he had merely to disclose himself to prove again their courage and nobility. The life of Gorky has been particularly tragic and particularly Russian. He was born in a dyer's shop in Nizhni-Novgorad in 1869. His real name is Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, and it is significant that when he came to write he signed himself "Maxim Gorky"--"Maxim, the Bitter." His father died when he was four and he was totally orphaned at seven. His childhood was spent in the care of his maternal grandfather, who was extremely religious and a miser. The foundation of the bitterness he was to feel was thus laid early, for the life of the lonely child with the harsh, unsympathetic old man, can be well imagined, though the peculiarly Russian setting can be had only by reading his recent book, _My Childhood_. At the death of his mother he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and at eleven he decided that he had had enough of home ties and left Nizhni-Novgorad for good. He started tramping and after various vicissitudes found himself a helper to a cook on one of the Volga boats. This man had been at one time a noncommissioned officer and he carried his past culture with him in the form of a trunk full of books. It was a queer assortment, from Gogol to school manuals and popular novels, and Gorky dipped liberally into it. The result was that a craving for real learning arose in him, which would have come no doubt to the imaginative youth at this age even without the aid of that haphazard library. He left the Volga steamer and tramped to the University of Kazan, thinking that learning would be free to any one who wished it. He was bitterly disappointed, for the University demanded fees, and so instead of registering as a student he was forced to take a job as a bakery helper. This work he did for two years and it seems to have made a deep impression upon him, for there is scarcely a story of his where the hero does not spend two years baking bread in some filthy cellar among flour dust and general filth.