 1. If I were not perfectly sure of my power to write, and of my marvelous ability to express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness. So, more or less, I had thought of beginning my tale. Further, I should have drawn the reader's attention to the fact that had I lacked that power, that ability, etc., not only should I have refrained from describing certain recent events, but there would have been nothing to describe. For gentle reader, nothing at all would have happened. Silly, perhaps, but at least clear, the gift of penetrating life's devices and innate disposition toward the constant exercise of the creative faculty could alone have enabled me. At this point, I should have compared the breaker of the law, which makes such a fuss over a little spilled blood with a poet or a stage performer, but as my poor left-handed friend used to put it, philosophic speculation is the invention of the rich, down with it. It may look as though I do not know how to start. Funny sight, the elderly gentleman who comes lumbering by, jowl flesh, flopping in a valiant dash for the last bus, which he eventually overtakes, but is afraid to board in motion and so with a sheepish smile drops back, still going at a trot. Is it, did I dare not make the leap? It roars, gathers speed, will presently vanish irrevocably around the corner, the bus, the motor-bus, the mighty monter-bus of my tale. Rather bulky imagery this. I am still running. My father was a Russian-speaking German from Ravall, where he went to a famous agricultural college. My mother, a pure Russian, came from an old princely stock. On hot summer days a languid lady in lilac silks. She would recline in her rocking chair fanning herself, munching chocolate, all the blinds down, and the wind from some new mown field making them billow like purple sails. During the war I was interned as a German subject, Johnny Bad luck, considering that I had just entered the University of St. Petersburg. From the end of 1914 to the middle of 1919 I read exactly one thousand and eighteen books. Sample complete. Ready to continue?