My grandfather (the kingdom of heaven be his! may he eat only wheaten rolls and poppy-seed cakes with honey, in the other world!) Could tell a story wonderfully well. When he used to begin a tale you could not stir from the spot all day, but kept on listening.
He was not like the story-teller of the present day, when he begins to lie, with a tongue as though he had had nothing to eat for three days, so that you snatch your cap and flee from the house.
I remember my old mother was alive then, and in the long winter evenings when the frost was crackling out of doors, and had sealed up hermetically the narrow panes of our cottage, she used to sit at her wheel, drawing out a long thread in her hand, rocking the cradle with her foot, and humming a song, which I seem to hear even now.
The lamp, quivering and flaring up as though in fear of something, lighted up our cottage; the spindle hummed; and all of us children, collected in a cluster, listened to our grandfather, who had not crawled off the stove for more than five years, owing to his great age.
But the wondrous tales of the incursions of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and the Poles, the bold deeds of Polkova, of Poltar-Kozhukh, and Sagaidatchnii, did not interest us so much as the stories about some deed of old, which always sent a shiver through our frames and made our hair rise upright on our heads.
Terror possession
Sometimes such terror took possession of us in consequence of them, that, from that evening forward, Heaven knows how wonderful everything seemed to us. If one chanced to go out of the cottage after nightfall for anything, one fancied that a visitor from the other world had lain down to sleep in one`s bed; and I have often taken my own smock, at a distance, as it lay at the head of the bed, for the Evil One rolled up in a ball! But the chief thing about grandfather`s stories was, that he had never lied in all his life; and whatever he said was so was so.
I will now tell you one of his wonderful tales. I know that there are a great many wise people who copy in the courts, and can even read civil documents, but who, if you were to put into their hand a simple prayer-book, could not make out the first letter in it, and would show all their teeth in derision.
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