Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/287

 Rh a globe, I explained it, as it seemed to me, admirably. They listened to me with great attention and interest. Especially interested were they to know something which their fathers did not believe and to be able to boast of their wisdom.

At the end of my explanation of "winter " and "summer" the skeptic Semka, the keenest-witted of all, staggered me with the question:—

"How does the earth move and yet our izba still stand in the same place? Why, it ought to have moved from its place."

I perceived that in my explanation I had shot a thousand versts beyond the range of the most intelligent of the children; what must the dullest have understood of it? I went back—I explained, I made sketches, I adduced all the proofs of the roundness of the earth; voyages around the globe, the masts of a ship showing before the deck and all the rest, and consoling myself with the thought that now they certainly understood, I set them to writing the lesson. All wrote: "The earth is like a ball—first proof …. second proof ….;" they forgot the third proof and asked me about it. It was evident that the principal thing for them was to remember the proofs. More than once, more than a dozen times, yes, a hundred times I returned to these explanations and always unsuccessfully. At any examination the pupils would all answer, and they do now, satisfactorily. But I feel that they do not understand, and when I remember that I did not understand the matter very well until after I was thirty, I have pardoned them for this dullness of comprehension. I in my childhood believed that the world was round, and the like, but did not understand it, and so it is with them now. It was always far easier for me to comprehend what my nurse told me: that at the end of the world the earth and the sky met, and there at the end of the world the women wash their linen in the sea and mangle it on the sky. Our pupils have long been confirmed, and even now still persist, in notions diametrically opposed to those I wanted to give them. For a long time still, before they