"Stop it, you mice!"
The sun was shining, a gay noise filled the air and everything about us fluttered and floated with it, blinding me with its light and wrapping me in its warmth.
Mikhail greeted me and shook my hand.
"We are going to the wood," he said. "Do you want to come along?"
It was a pleasant sight. There was one fat youngster who snatched my cap, put it on his head and flew about the courtyard like a butterfly.
I went to the wood with this band of madcaps, and the day remains engraven on my memory.
The children poured out into the street and fled to the mountain lightly, like feathers in the wind. I walked alongside of their shepherd, and it seemed to me that I had never seen such charming children before.
Mikhail and I walked behind them. He gave them orders, crying out to them; but the children refused to listen to him. They jostled, fought and bombarded one another with pine cones, and quarreled. When they were tired they surrounded us, crawled about our feet like beetles, pulled at their teacher's hands, asked him now about the grass, now about the flowers, and he answered each one in a friendly way, as if to an equal. He rose above them like a white sail.
The children were all alert, but some of them were more serious and thoughtful than their age warranted. Silent, they kept near their teacher.
Later the children again spread themselves out and Mikhail said to me, low: