Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/192

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We decided on the placards, and when one of the girls had embroidered them, all the scholars looked on with angry pleasure, and ridiculed the offenders. They proposed a still more severe punishment: "To take them to the village, and make an exhibition of them with the placards on during the holiday," was their proposal.

The offenders wept.

The peasant lad who had been led away by the other was a talented story-teller and humorist, a fat, white-haired little snipper-snapper, and he cried as if his heart would break,—as hard as a child could cry. The other, the principal criminal, a boy with a hawk nose, with dry features, and an intelligent face, grew pale, his lips trembled, his eyes glared wildly and angrily at his gay companions, and he occasionally hid his face on account of tears that were unnatural to him. His cap, with torn vizor, was pulled down to the nape of his neck; his hair was in disorder; his clothes were soiled with chalk. His whole appearance struck me and all of us with the same surprise, as if we had seen it for the first time.

The contemptuous looks of all rested on him. And this stung him to the quick. When, without looking round, but hanging his head, and with that mien peculiar to criminals, as it seemed to me, he went off home, with the pack of boys chasing him, and nagging him in an unnatural and strangely pitiless fashion, as if some evil spirit influenced them against their will, something told me that it was all wrong.

But things went on as before, and the thief came for several days with his placard. But it seemed to me that from that time he began to degenerate in his studies, and he was no longer seen to take part in the games and converse of his companions outside the class-room.

When, one day, I went into class, all the scholars told me with horror that he had been stealing again.