My earliest recollections are among the most painful of all those scenes of my life which have impressed themselves upon my memory; for they are connected with the murder of my dear mother--the base and barbarous murder of as good and indulgent a mother as ever brought into the world and nourished a promising little Bruin family, for such, I think, my small brothers and sisters and I may fairly be called. I will record the shocking circumstances of our great domestic tragedy exactly as they occurred. My earliest recollections are of life in a dark and confined space in which my two brothers and my two sisters and I had but little room for our juvenile recreations. I remember a dear old mother who divided her time in sleeping, and admonishing and educating us. We were born in this place, she told us; it was called a "_berloga_," and was the den she had prepared for herself as a shelter during the long months of a cold and cruel Russian winter. It was not cold inside this den of ours, on the contrary it was very warm indeed. We had been born in December, and between that month and March we had had plenty of time to grow--we little ones--so that the _berloga_, which had been amply large enough for my mother alone, had become what I may describe as a tight fit for the six of us. It was lucky, mother used to say, that father was not with us at the time. He was away--she did not seem to know where, exactly, but she had arranged to meet him near a certain village, whose name she mentioned, some time in spring. I remember our mother used often to say, "_Do_ let me go to sleep now, my dears; when you are older you will understand how difficult it is to keep awake in the winter time after the fatigues of a long season!" and, indeed, the good soul used frequently to fall fast asleep in the very midst of our lesson time--much to our joy, for we were always ready for a game of romps in that heyday time of childhood. Mother would have slept the whole winter but for us brats, she used to tell us! Well, one day about the end of March, when the other children and I were busily engaged in rolling over one another, and pretending to worry each other's ears, which was a favourite game of ours, we heard a terrible noise outside. Up to this time we had never heard any sound at all excepting such as we made ourselves. There were shouts and barking of dogs, and a creature--whom I afterwards discovered to be a human--was knocking at the sides of our house with a long pole--we could see all this through a small peephole which we kept open. We also saw other human creatures standing near. These last held in their hands steel sticks clubbed at one end, and were looking straight into the mouth of the den. Mother was fast asleep and we were obliged to awake her, for we felt alarmed at the aspect of these human creatures, puny beings though they seemed when compared with our beloved parent, who was so very much larger and stronger than they.