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der Vater’... ‘Gott der Sohn.’ He laughed again and lisped
‘Gott der Sohn.’ ‘Gott der heilige Geist.’ Then he laughed
and said as best he could, ‘Gott der heilige Geist.’ I went
away, and two days after I happened to be passing, and he
shouted to me of himself, ‘Uncle, Gott der Vater, Gott der
Sohn,’ and he had only forgotten ‘Gott der heilige Geist.’
But I reminded him of it and I felt very sorry for him again.
But he was taken away, and I did not see him again. Twenty-
three years passed. I am sitting one morning in my study,
a white-haired old man, when there walks into the room
a blooming young man, whom I should never have recog-
nised, but he held up his finger and said, laughing, ‘Gott der
Vater, Gott der Sohn, and Gott der heilige Geist. I have just
arrived and have come to thank you for that pound of nuts,
for no one else ever bought me a pound of nuts; you are
the only one that ever did.’ then I remembered my happy
youth and the poor child in the yard, without boots on his
feet, and my heart was touched and I said, ‘You are a grate-
ful young man, for you have remembered all your life the
pound of nuts I bought you in your childhood.’ And I em-
braced him and blessed him. And I shed tears. He laughed,
but he shed tears, too... for the Russian often laughs when
he ought to be weeping. But he did weep; I saw it. And now,
alas!..’
‘And I am weeping now, German, I am weeping now, too,
you saintly man,’ Mitya cried suddenly.
In any case the anecdote made a certain favourable im-
pression on the public. But the chief sensation in Mitya’s
favour was created by the evidence of Katerina Ivanovna,

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