He began teaching the quiet child even before Varvara Petrovna had begun to think about her.

I repeat again, it was wonderful how children took to him.

Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushin had been taught by him from the age of eight till eleven (Stepan Trofimovitch took no fees, of course, for his lessons, and would not on any account have taken payment from the Drozdovs).

But he fell in love with the charming child and used to tell her poems of a sort about the creation of the world, about the earth, and the history of humanity.
His lectures about the primitive peoples and primitive man were more interesting than the Arabian Nights.

Liza, who was ecstatic over these stories, used to mimic Stepan Trofimovitch very funnily at home.