the gates—but only to hear his mother calling from a window—
"Nurse, nurse, do you not see that the boy has just run out into the sunshine? Pray bring him back into the shade, or he will get a sunstroke, and be ill, and sick, and unable to eat! Besides, he might run down into the ravine!"
"Oh, the naughty darling!" the nurse muttered to herself as she dragged him back on to the veranda. The child looked about him with the keen, observant glance of a "grown-up" who is debating how best a morning can be spent. Not a trifle, not a circumstance, escaped the child's inquisitive attention, so that insensibly the picture of his home life engraved itself upon his mind, and his sensitive intellect nourished itself on living examples, and involuntarily modelled its programme of life on the life which surrounded it.
Never at any time could it be said that the morning was wasted in the Oblomovs' establishment. The sound of knives in the kitchen, as they minced cutlets and vegetables, reached even to the village; while from the servants' quarters came the hum of a spindle, coupled with the thin, low voice of an old woman—but a voice so low
