he exclaimed. "They have their lessons as well as you; and you had better be off to yours, sir."
When Serozha reached his room, instead of attending to his tasks, he poured out into the tutor's ears all his surmises about the present which had been brought him. "It must be a locomotive engine; what do you think about it?" he asked; but Vasili Lukitch was thinking of nothing except the grammar lesson, which had to be ready for the professor, who came at two o'clock.
"No, but you must just tell me one thing, Vasili Lukitch," asked the child, who was now sitting at his desk, with his book in his hands: "what is there higher than the Alexander Nevsky? You know that papa has just received the Alexander Nevsky."
Vasili Lukitch replied that the order of Vladimir was higher.
"And above that?"
"St. Andrew[1] above them all."
"And above that?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't you know?" and Serozha, leaning his head on his hand, began to think.
The child's thoughts were very varied and complicated; he imagined that his father perhaps was going to have the orders of Vladimir and St. Andrew, and that therefore he would be more indulgent for that day's lessons; and that he himself When he grew up, would do his best to deserve all the decorations, even those that would be given higher than that of St. Andrew. A new order would scarcely have time to be founded before he would make himself worthy of it.
These thoughts made the time pass so quickly that, when the professor came, his lesson about the circumstances of time, and place, and mode of action was not prepared at all; and the professor seemed not only dissatisfied, but distressed. His professor distress touched Serozha. He felt that he was to blame for not having learned his lesson. In spite of all his efforts, he really had been unable to do it. When the professor was
- ↑ Andreï Pervozbanny, Andrew the First-called or Protokletos.
