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God bless the woods for evermore,

Of useful rods the living store;

Birch is for youth the needful kind,

Nought but stiff oak brings age to mind.

It was prescribed by a royal ukase that a number of strong soldiers should be chosen from the Guards Regiment, one of whom, lash in hand, should be present in each room during the lessons; and should one of the pupils misbehave, he was to be lashed, irrespective of his rank or family. But neither rods nor lashes could knock learning into their heads; both young and old learnt badly. Sometimes in moments of despair they would sing, “the Song of Babylon.” The older ones, their voices hoarse with excessive drink, would start:

We with school life can’t agree,

The use of rods is far too free.

The shriller young voices chimed in:—

Sorry and sad

Is every lad.

then both high and low would join in the chorus.

Tichon would have learnt little in the school had he not attracted the attention of one of his teachers, the Pastor Glück, a native of Königsberg. Glück, who had acquired a kind of Russian from a runaway Polish monk, came to Russia “to teach,” quoting his own words, “the Muscovy youths, who were soft and impressionable as clay.” He was soon disillusioned however, not so much by the youths themselves, as by the Russian method employed in training them, “like horses,” knocking knowledge into their heads with whips. Glück was kind and clever in spite of being a drunkard; sorrow drove him to drink, because not only Russians but even Germans considered him mad. He was engaged upon an enormous task, the writing of commentaries on “Newton’s Commentary to the Apocalypse”; a book in which all Christian revelations concerning the end of the world were proved by minute astronomical calculations, based on the laws of gravitation, laid down in Newton’s recently published “Philosophæ Naturalis Principia Mathematical.”