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"I was a quiet, lonely child.
"He who is always surrounded by love, and who has never known anything but love, often learns most easily to suffice to himself. And yet in my heart, too, there lay an inexhaustible store of love. I squandered it on dumb creatures, petted the dogs, kissed the cats, and hugged the geese. One of my passions was to play in the stable: there I lolled about on the soft, warm straw, under the very hoofs of my special pets, that never did me any harm; or I climbed into the manger, where I could sit for hours and gaze lovingly into my friends' great brown eyes. But my favourite place was in the dog-kennel. There they often found me asleep at midday, and it was no easy matter to get me out again: for Nero, who was as a rule so quiet and good, showed his teeth to any one, even to his master, who came within reach of his chain on such occasions. My tender affection extended also to the vegetable kingdom. The rose-trees appeared to me like enchanted princesses, whose fate I bitterly bewailed; the sunflowers were Catholic priests in full canonicals, and the dahlias Polish maidservants with red head-dresses. Thus I succeeded in assembling around me in the garden the whole human world, and found the counterfeit presentment preferable to the original, for it submitted in silence when I ordained its fate.
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"The estate that my father had rented was the old feudal possession of a Polish magnate, which lay close to the Prussian frontier, on a hill whose one side sloped down gradually in a weed-grown park towards barren fields, while the other dropped down precipitately towards a rivulet, on whose opposite bank lay a dirty little Polish frontier village.
"When one stood on the brink of the precipice one looked down upon the tumble-down shingle roofs, through the crevices of which smoke issued forth, and could see right into the midst of the wretched traffic of the miry street, where half-naked children wallowed in the gutter, women crouched idly on the doorsteps, and the men in ragged fustian coats trooped, with their spades on their shoulders, towards the alehouse.
"Verily there was little that was attractive about this small town, and the rabble of frontier Cossacks, that trotted to and fro sleepily on their cat-like nags, did not enhance its charms. But yet, to my childish eyes, it was enveloped in inexpressible glamour, the sensation of which creeps over me even to-day, when I picture to myself how, bewitched by all these wonderful visions, I sat for hours motionless on the grass, and stared down upon the throng in which the figures were no larger than the wooden dolls in my box of toys.
"I had been forbidden to go down, nor had I any desire to do so, since I had once been almost crushed to death between two wheels in the crowd of the weekly market to which my father had taken me.
"It was only delightful when from up there, raised high above the dirt and screaming, one could gaze down upon this world of ants, which seemed so tiny that, like the Creator Himself, one could command it with a look, but which grew larger and larger, and assumed weird, giant proportions the more one attempted to penetrate into it.
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