Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com vellous and beautiful sayings of his, though we did not
understand them at the time. He died the third week after
Easter. He was fully conscious though he could not talk; up
to his last hour he did not change. He looked happy, his eyes
beamed and sought us, he smiled at us, beckoned us. There
was a great deal of talk even in the town about his death. I
was impressed by all this at the time, but not too much so,
though I cried a good deal at his funeral. I was young then,
a child, but a lasting impression, a hidden feeling of it all,
remained in my heart, ready to rise up and respond when
the time came. So indeed it happened.
(b) Of the Holy Scriptures in the Life of Father Zossima.
I was left alone with my mother. Her friends began advis-
ing her to send me to Petersburg as other parents did. ‘You
have only one son now,’ they said, ‘and have a fair income,
and you will be depriving him perhaps of a brilliant career
if you keep him here.’ They suggested I should be sent to Pe-
tersburg to the Cadet Corps, that I might afterwards enter
the Imperial Guard. My mother hesitated for a long time, it
was awful to part with her only child, but she made up her
mind to it at last, though not without many tears, believing
she was acting for my happiness. She brought me to Peters-
burg and put me into the Cadet Corps, and I never saw her
again. For she too died three years afterwards. She spent
those three years mourning and grieving for both of us.
From the house of my childhood I have brought noth-
ing but precious memories, for there are no memories more
precious than those of early childhood in one’s first home.
And that is almost always so if there is any love and har-