Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
Once, forgetting that Nilushka was imbecile, I conceived an irrepressible desire to talk with him, and to read him good poetry, and to tell him both of the world's youthful hopes and of my own personal thoughts. The occasion happened on a day when, as I was sitting on the edge of the ravine, and dangling my legs over the ravine's depths, the lad came floating towards me as though on air.
Softly there next presents herself before the window Felitzata, a woman of about forty with a hawk-like gleam in her coldly civil eyes, and a pair of handsome lips compressed into a covert smile. She is well known throughout the suburb, and once had a son, Nilushka, who was the local "God's fool."
With a splutter Vologonov said: "Truly you are a difficult subject to deal with!" And with that he fell to pacing the floor with long, thoughtful strides as the idiot's voice cried in quavering accents: "O Lo-ord, have me-ercy upon us!" Thus the winsome Nilushka proved indispensable to the foul, mean, unhealthy life of the suburb.
For instance, as he would be skipping along, with his childish voice raised in his little ditty, some idler or another would shout from a window, or through the cranny of a fence: "Hi, Nilushka! Fire! Fire!"
"'A lantern," began Nilushka civilly. "'A lantern? Yes. Well, go on, and say, 'I am a lantern unto thee " "I want to sing, it." "There is no need for that, though presently you shall sing it. For the moment your task is to learn the correct speaking of things. So say after me " "O Lo-ord, have mercy!" came in a quiet, thoughtful chant from the idiot.
Whereupon Nilushka glanced fearfully at the mysteriously pointing finger, and, plucking sharply at his forehead, shoulders, and stomach with two fingers and a thumb, intoned in thin, plaintive accents: "Our Father in Heaven " "WHICH ART in Heaven." "Yes, in the Heaven of Heavens." "Ah, well! God will understand. Again, great was Nilushka's interest in anything spherical.
Once upon a time there used to glide past the window of my room the fair, curly, wavering, golden head of Nilushka the idiot, a lad looking like a thing which the earth has begotten of love.
Then I moved away, for upon my heart there was pressing a burden of unendurable sorrow, and I was yearning, oh, so terribly, to see Nilushka once more. The back portion of Felitzata's cot stood a little sunken into the ground, so that the front portion had its cold window panes and raised sash tilted a trifle towards the remote heavens. I bent my head, and entered by the open door.
Sometimes hopping along on one leg, and smiling, and waving his arms, and causing the ample folds and sleeves of his smock to flutter until he seemed to be moving in the midst of a nimbus, Nilushka would sing in a halting whisper the childish ditty: Oh Lo-ord, pardon me! Wo-olves run, And do-ogs run, And the hunters wait To kill the wolves. Oh Lo-ord, pardon me!
In his hands, with their fingers as slender as a girl's, he was holding a large leaf; and as he gazed at it the smile of his clear blue eyes was, as it were, pervading him from head to foot. "Whither, Nilushka?" said I. With a start he raised his head and eyes heavenward.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking