If I were to read my character backwards, I ought to believe that I did miss what I lacked in our days of privation; for I know, to my shame, that in more recent years I have cried for jam.

But I am trying not to reason, only to remember; and from many scattered and shadowy memories, that glimmer and fade away so fast that I cannot fix them on this page, I form an idea, almost a conviction, that it was with me as I say.
However indifferent I may have been to what I had not, I was fully alive to what I had.

So when I came to Vitebsk I eagerly seized on the many new things that I found around me; and these new impressions and experiences affected me so much that I count that visit as an epoch in my Russian life.
I was very much at home in my uncle's household.

I was a little afraid of my aunt, who had a quick temper, but on the whole I liked her.

She was fair and thin and had a pretty smile in the wake of her tempers.
Uncle Solomon was an old friend.