Page:Andreyev - The Crushed Flower (Knopf, 1917).djvu/14

12 city along the large streets, he remembered best of all, upon his return, the wide, flat stones upon which his steps and his feet seemed terribly small, like two little boats. And even the multitude of revolving wheels and horses' heads did not impress themselves so clearly upon his memory as this new and unusually interesting appearance of the ground.

Everything was enormous to him—the fences, the dogs and the people—but that did not at all surprise or frighten him; that only made everything particularly interesting; that transformed life into an uninterrupted miracle. According to his measures, various objects seemed to him as follows:

His father—ten yards tall.

His mother—three yards.

The neighbour's angry dog—thirty yards. Their own dog—ten yards, like papa.

Their house of one story was very, very tall—a mile.

The distance between one side of the street and the other—two miles.

Their garden and the trees in their garden seemed immense, infinitely tall.

The city—a million—just how much he did not know.

And everything else appeared to him in the same way. He knew many people, large and small, but he knew and appreciated better the little ones with whom he could speak of everything. The grown people behaved so foolishly and asked such absurd, dull questions about things that everybody knew, that it was necessary for him also to make believe that he