Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/35

Rh vara Vassilyevna Tchesnokova, a daughter of the chief of the Central Police Bureau at Petrograd.

I came into the world on August 2nd (14th) 1865, at Petrograd, on the Yelagin Island, in an official building belonging to the castle, where my parents used to spend the summer. I still love the melancholy thickets and the ponds in the marshy Yelagin Park, where we children, under the influence of Mayne-Reid and Cooper, used to play at "Indians." The pine-tree in which, hovering like a bird in the airy heights, I used to read and dream, and, far from all mankind, felt like a free "savage," is there to this very day. I can still remember how we would explore the gloomy cellars of the castle, where the stalactites hanging from the damp ceiling sparkled in the candle-light; or how we mounted to the flat green dome of the castle from which we had a view of the sea; and also, how we went boating, and, on the sandy shore of the Krestovsky Island we would light a fire and bake potatoes, and feel more like "savages" than ever.

In winter we used to stay in the old Bauer House, which was built as long ago as the days of Peter the Great. It stands at the corner of the Neva and the Fontanka, by the Pratcheshny Bridge, opposite the Summer Garden. On one side we had the summer palace of Peter I., on the other his "cottage" and the oldest church in Petrograd, the wooden Trinity Cathedral. My