Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/232

218 He wanted them to tell him that it was an impossibility to count the dumplings.

A college is an impossibility.

Very poor is impossible.

They read it again. As if they were hunting for a needle they tried to find the word the teacher wanted, they hit on everything except the word count, and they at last fell into despair.

I—the teacher—did not give up, and after great labor got them to analyze the whole sentence; but they understood it much less clearly than when the first pupil read it.

However, there was really nothing to understand. The carelessly constructed and involved sentence conveyed no meaning to the reader, other than that at once perceived: "The poor and hungry people ate dumplings," and that was all the author really had to say.

I was concerned only about the form, which was bad, and in bothering about this I spoiled the whole class during the entire after-dinner hour, beat down and destroyed a quantity of intellectual blossoms just beginning to put forth.

Another time I struggled in just the same wrong and disgusting way on the elucidation of the word arudiye, "instrument," and just as ineffectually.

On that same day, in the drawing-class, the pupil Ch protested because the teacher insisted on his inscribing on his copy-book the title Romashka's Drawings. He declared:—

"We ourselves draw in copy-books, but only Romashka designed the figures, and so we should write, not the drawings, but the work of Romashka."

How the distinction of these ideas came into his head remains for me a mystery which it is best not to try to solve, but in exactly the same way it is a mystery how participles and subordinate clauses sometimes—though rarely—are introduced into their compositions.

It is necessary to give a pupil the opportunity of acquiring new ideas and words from the general sense of the discourse. If he hears or reads an