Other occasions there were when memories of his childhood would return to him. Once more he would relive those childish, untroubled years, with their quiet pleasures and their endless happinesses. Once more he would experience the first delightful impressions of life which he had experienced when swarms of good fairies had come flying out of every flower which he picked, to talk to him in the luscious meadow which lay in front of the little acacia-framed villa. Other good fairies there were who smiled at him from the end of the great clear lake on the banks of which he had so often dozed the hours away as he listened to the murmuring of the ripples. Then there were fairies who were born of gorgeous, smiling dreams; who lulled him to sleep with the rustling of their wings at the hour when his mother laid him in his little bed, and made the sign of the cross over his forehead, and embraced him, and soothed him to slumber with lullabies which should prepare him for the long, quiet night. At this point Ordynov’s vision would also be confronted by a being who, from the boy’s childhood upwards, had caused him terror, and had communicated to his life the first baleful poison of melancholy. In a dim sort of way Ordynov had felt that this being, this mysterious old man, was destined to overshadow his future for ever and ever; with the result that the child always trembled when he beheld him, and could not take his eyes off him, even for an instant. Besides, the cursed old man constantly pursued him. In the garden he would first come and spy him out, and then throw him mocking salutes as he popped his head, first over one bush, and then over another. In the house, too, he would successively transform himself into each doll that the boy possessed, and laugh at and tease him, and make faces at him through his hands, like some malicious gnome. And at school, too, he would incite Ordynov’s bullying comrades to ill-treat their victim, or else take a seat beside him on the bench, and mingle in a blurred smudge with each letter in the grammar. Finally he would settle himself at night beside Ordynov’s pillow, and chase away the bands of good fairies who had been beating their gold and sapphire wings around the cot, and put Ordynov’s poor mother, too, to flight, and banish her from her son, and then spend the whole of the long, long night muttering some fantastic legend which was quite incomprehensible to poor little Ordynov, but which pained and agitated him with its premature passions and terrors. Deaf alike to prayers and sobs, the old man would continue his occupation until his victim had fallen into a state of torpor which almost bordered upon a fainting fit.