“And I despise your books, despise all worldly blessings and wisdom.  Everything is void, frail, visionary and delusive as a mirage.  Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.

“You are mad, and gone the wrong way.  You take falsehood for truth and ugliness for beauty.  You would marvel if suddenly apple and orange trees should bear frogs and lizards instead of fruit, and if roses should begin to breathe the odour of a sweating horse.  So do I marvel at you, who have bartered heaven for earth.  I do not want to understand you.

“That I may show you in deed my contempt for that by which you live, I waive the two millions of which I once dreamed as of paradise, and which I now despise.  That I may deprive myself of my right to them, I shall come out from here five minutes before the stipulated term, and thus shall violate the agreement.”

When he had read, the banker put the sheet on the table, kissed the head of the strange man, and began to weep.  He went out of the wing.  Never at any other time, not even after his terrible losses on the Exchange, had he felt such contempt for himself as now.  Coming home, he lay down on his bed, but agitation and tears kept him a long time from sleeping...

The next morning the poor watchman came running to him and told him that they had seen the man who lived in the wing climb through the window into the garden.  He had gone to the gate and disappeared.  The banker instantly went with his servants to the wing and established the escape of his prisoner.  To avoid unnecessary rumours he took the paper with the renunciation from the table and, on his return, locked it in his safe.

VANKA

BY ANTON P. CHEKHOV

Nine-year-old Vanka Zhukov, who had been apprentice to the shoemaker Aliakhin for three months, did not go to bed the night before Christmas.  He waited till the master and mistress and the assistants had gone out to an early church-service, to procure from his employer’s cupboard a small phial of ink and a penholder with a rusty nib; then, spreading a crumpled sheet of paper in front of him, he began to write.

Before, however, deciding to make the first letter, he looked furtively at the door and at the window, glanced several times at the sombre ikon, on either side of which stretched shelves full of lasts, and heaved a heart-rending sigh.  The sheet of paper was spread on a bench, and he himself was on his knees in front of it.

“Dear Grandfather Konstantin Makarych,” he wrote, “I am writing you a letter.  I wish you a Happy Christmas and all God’s holy best.  I have no mamma or papa, you are all I have.”