Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/92

68 day he ordered the coachman Sidor to give me a sound hiding, and this was carried out with all due zeal.

In the spring of 1832 I completed my eighteenth year. As the hopes which my master had placed in my ability as a lackey had not been justified, he gave in to my unceasing requests and hired me by contract for a period of four years to a guild-master of painting, a certain Shiryayev in St. Petersburg. This Shiryayev united within himself the qualities of the Spartanic sacristan, the painter-deacon, and the other sacristan, the cheiromant. Regardless of the pressure which proceeded from his threefold genius, I spent the clear spring nights in the Summer Garden (Lyetny Sad) at St. Petersburg, and made drawings of the statues which embellish that rectilinear structure of Peter the Great. At one of these seances I made the acquaintance of the artist Ivan Maximovitch Soshenko, with whom I still maintain the most sincerely fraternal relations. On the advice of Soshenko, I began to try my hand at water-colour studies from Nature. During my numerous early and smudgy attempts I had a model in the person of Ivan Netchyporenko, a Cossack, another fellow-countryman and friend of mine, and one of our estate-owner's farm-servants. One day the estate-owner noticed my work in Netchyporenko's possession, and it pleased him so much that he