"Tell me, Ilya, how is it that such little eyes as men have can see everything? One can see the whole street, the whole town; how can anything so big get into our little eyes?" Or he would stare up into the sky and say suddenly: "Ah! the sun." "Well--what?" asked Ilya. "How it blazes away!" "Well, what then?" "Oh nothing. D'you know what I was thinking? The sun and moon must be parents and the stars are their children." At first Ilya pondered deeply over his odd sayings, but by degrees these fancies began to worry him, because they took his mind off the things that were happening close to him. And there were many things happening, and the boy had soon learnt to take good heed of them. One day he came home from school and said with scorn to old Jeremy: "Our teacher--ah!--he's a good one! Yesterday the son of Malafyeyev the merchant, smashed a window, and he let him off very easy, and to-day he's had the window mended and paid for it out of his own pocket." "But see then, how good he is!" answered Jeremy. "Good? Oh yes--very good! A little time ago Vanika Klutscharev broke a window, and he made him go without his dinner, and then he sent for Vanika's father and said: Here, pay me forty kopecks; and so Vanika got a licking from his father--that's how good he is!" "You mustn't trouble over things like that, Ilyusha," said the old man, blinking nervously. "Try and think that it doesn't concern you. It's for God to decide what is wrong and not for us. We don't understand, we can only find out the bad things, and we're not quick to see the good. But He can weigh everything. He knows the measure and the value of everything. Look at me, I have lived so long and seen so much and no one could count how much wrong-doing I've seen. But I have never seen the truth. Eighty years have gone over my head, and it cannot be in all that long time that the truth has not come near me. But I have never seen it, I don't know it." "Ah!" said Ilya doubtfully, "What's there to know in this? If this one must pay forty kopecks so ought the other, that's the truth." But the old man would not agree. He said many things about himself, about the blindness of men, and how they are not fit to judge one another rightly, and how only the judgment of God is just. Ilya listened attentively, but his face grew darker and his eyes more gloomy. "When will God come and judge us?" he asked suddenly. "No man knows; when the hour strikes, then He will come down from the clouds to judge the living and the dead: but no man knows when it will come to pass. But on Saturday we will both go to the holy service." "Yes, let's go." "All right."