Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/89

Rh his skill, if only in a tiny degree. But, alas! Apelles observed my left hand attentively and refused my request point-blank. He informed me, to my bitter sorrow, that I had no aptitude for anything, not even for cobbling or coopering.

So I lost all hope of ever becoming even a medium painter, and with a saddened heart I returned to my native village. I had in view a modest destiny, which, however, my imagination endued with a certain artless bliss. I wished to become, as Homer puts it, the herdsman of stainless flocks, intending, as I roamed on bebind the assembled drove, to read at leisure my beloved stolen picture-book. But in this, too, I was unlucky. My estate-owner, who had just come into his paternal heritage, needed a smart lad, and so the ragged scholar-vagrant, having donned just a twill jacket with trousers to match, became a full-blown page-boy.

The discovery of such page-boys is due to the Poles, the civilisers of the Ukraine beyond the Dnieper. The landed proprietors of other nationalities adopted, and still do adopt, from them these page-boys—undeniably an ingenious device. To train up a handy lackey from very childhood means as much in this whilom Cossack region as the subjugation to man's will of the swift-footed reindeer in Lapland. The Polish estate-owners of a former age kept these so-called "Kozatchki" not only as lackeys, but they made