Fables for Children, Stories for Children, Natural Science Stories, Popular Education, Decembrists, Moral Tales

by graf Leo Tolstoy

And the bishop began to say, "Our Father." And one of the hermits repeated, "Our Father," and the second repeated, "Our Father," and the third repeated, "Our Father."

"Which art in heaven." The hermit repeated, "Which art in heaven." But the middle hermit got mixed in his words, and did not say it right; and the tall, naked hermit did not say it right: his moustache was all over his mouth, and he could not speak clearly; and the stooping, toothless hermit, too, lisped it indistinctly.

The bishop repeated it a second time, and the hermits repeated it after him. And the bishop sat down on a stone, and the hermits stood around him and looked into his mouth and repeated after him so long as he spoke. And the bishop worked with them all day; he repeated one word ten, and twenty, and a hundred times, and the hermits repeated after him. They blundered, and he corrected them, and made them repeat from the beginning.

The bishop did not leave the hermits until he taught them the whole Lord's prayer. They said it with him and by themselves. The middle-sized hermit was the first to learn it, and he repeated it all by himself. The bishop made him say it over and over again, and both the others said the prayer, too.

It was beginning to grow dark, and the moon rose from the sea, when the bishop got up to go back to the ship. The bishop bade the hermits good-bye, and they bowed to the ground before him. He raised each of them, and kissed them, and told them to pray as he had taught them, and entered the boat, and was rowed back to the ship.

And as the boat was rowed toward the ship, the bishop heard the hermits loudly repeating the Lord's prayer in three voices. The boat came nearer to the ship, and the voices of the hermits could no longer be heard, but in the moonlight they could be seen standing on the shore, in the spot where they had been left: the smallest of them was in the middle, the tallest on the right, and the middle-sized man on the left. The bishop reached the ship and climbed up to the deck. The anchors were weighed, the sails unfurled, and the wind blew and drove the ship, and on they sailed. The bishop went to the prow and sat down there and looked at the island. At first the hermits could be seen, then they disappeared from view, and only the island could be seen; then the island, too, disappeared, and only the sea glittered in the moonlight.

The pilgrims lay down to sleep, and everything grew quiet on the deck. But the bishop did not feel like sleeping. He sat by himself at the prow and looked out to sea to where the island had disappeared, and thought of the good hermits. He thought of how glad they had been to learn the prayer, and thanked God for having taken him there to help the God's people,—to teach them the word of God.

The bishop was sitting and thinking and looking out to sea to where the island had disappeared. There was something unsteady in his eyes: now a light quivered in one place on the waves, and now in another. Suddenly he saw something white and shining in the moonlight,—either a bird, a gull, or a white sail on a boat. The bishop watched it closely.

"A sailboat is following after us," he thought. "It will soon overtake us. It was far, far away, but now it is very near. It is evidently not a boat, for there seems to be no sail. Still it is flying behind us and coming up close to us."

The bishop could not make out what it was: a boat, no, it was not a boat; a bird, no, not a bird; a fish, no, not a fish! It was like a man, but too large for that, and then, how was a man to be in the middle of the ocean? The bishop got up and walked over to the helmsman.