When Ivan Simonovich walked away, Mihas made up his mind not to leave his machine and kept an eye on the "fingers."

"Comrade Foreman! Comrade Foreman!" a soft voice, muffled by the din of the machines, teased.

Mihas heard, but he did not turn round. He knew it was Lyuda, for she was standing by a a pile of papers with her back to him and pretending she was busy.

"Mihas!"

Mihas affected not to hear.

"Comrade Lazunok, what's that you have there? D'you mean to say they're rejects?"

No longer able to contain herself, Lyuda sat down on the pile with a peal of ringing laughter.

To show Lyuda how much he was above all this foolery, Mihas began to whistle indifferently.

When he calmed down a little, he grew silent and thoughtful.

The way people talked you might think there were nothing but rejects! Still. . . .

He remembered the old man he had seen more than a month ago, when he was still in school. It happened during the break, when boredom made Mihas breathe a hole through the ice on the window-pane. That gave him a view of the street and the pedestrians. Three cars passed. Two soldiers in sheepskin coats drove a slelgh close to the pavement. Then Mihas' eye was caught by an old man leaning heavily on a stick and slowly picking his way through the snow along the high grey wall on the opposite side of the street.

"Take a peep," Mihas offered the Gypsy.

"I suppose you call that fun, eh, Space? I don't see what's making you so happy!" the Gypsy said, nonetheless bending down and looking through the hole.

"Can you see the old man?" Mihas asked.

"Can you see him, can you see. . . . I not only see him, I know him. He's an author. Jakub Kolas. Once I saw him going into the print-shop. He came about some book or other. Our assistant headmaster pointed him out to me. Look," the Gypsy said, putting his eye to the hole again, "he's going to the print-shop and he's got a briefcase under his arm like the last time."

This was something Mihas could not afford to miss! He seized his cap and ran outside.

To make Jakub Kolas notice a small pupil of the printing trades school, the least the boy should have done was to say: "Hello." But Mihas was tongue-tied. It could not be otherwise! There was much that Yakub Kolas would have had to be told to guess the thoughts that were harassing Mihas.

Above all he would have had to be told that a great heart lived in this small boy from the printing trades school and how this small boy had grown up.

. . .The war took Mihas out of school when he was only in the fourth grade and instead of continuing his studies he went to the forest with his father to join the partisans. There was the time when he was cut off in an enemy-infested swamp and a police dog found him and dragged him out by his foot. . . . His youth did not prevent the fascists from first torturing him and then packing him off in a goods van together with the adult prisoners. Now he knew that he had been bound for the Trostyianetski death camp to be burned in the furnaces there. But at the time, like the other prisoners, he knew nothing of his destination. He neither cared to know nor wanted the enemy he hated so much to take him anywhere. He jumped out of the van and rolled down the steep slope of a high embankment like a wounded hare. There had been some firing – nothing more.

Jakub Kolas would have had to be told how Mihas returned home to his collective farm. How he returned with only his mother and his elder sister Vera; his father was away pursuing the enemy.

The small, fourteen-year-old partisan set out for the town as soon as he heard from Lidiya Petrovna, the schoolmistress in the village, that a printing trades school was opening there; she had read about it in the papers. Mihas walked all the forty kilometres and when he reached the town, he wandered about the strange streets looking for the school. While the school was getting the dining-room ready, Mihas often had to go hungry. He shivered from the cold in his old clothes until the pupils were issued uniforms. All this would have had to be told if only to show how persistent Mihas had been to reach his goal. How he would soon be a printer and print the books Grandad Kolas wrote״he tales and poems he loved to read.

Yes, all this should have been told, but poor Space neither dared nor had the time. He was so confused that he even forgot to say: "Hello."

. . . Jack Frost had painted fantastic patterns on the big windows of the print-shop. Beyond the windows was the dark, silent night. But in the shop the presses rumbled endlessly, monotonously, like the surf on the sea-shore.

The printed pages moved in a continuous stream from under the drum to the long "fingers." Mihas Lazunok, the little printer, watched them intently and dreamed.

What if the door opened and Grandad Kolas walked in? Mihas pictured him coming up to his press, saying nothing at first, simply taking up the top page and looking at it in silence. Then, when he saw how well Mihas was printing his book, he would say:

"What is your name, laddie?"

"Oh, but that's lot of nonsense!" Mihas started pleasurably as though shaking off a spell of lazy drowsiness. "There's really no earthly reason for him to come here so late. Besides, he'll have to have a pass. And, anyway, I don't believe he ever comes here."

"Why shouldn't he come, after all?" Mihas asked himself, the dream returning. "He doesn't need a pass. The manager would personally bring him in. I'm printing his book, so why shouldn't he look in? What if he really does. . . ."

But these were only dreams! Yet, even if you didn't believe them, you quickly turned your head to make sure that no one was opening the door. For a minute the dream seemed so feasible that Mihras suddenly found himself tingling with excitement.

He bent towards the press and had the impression that Grandad Jakub Kolas was standing over him and watching. . . . The sensation was so real that he felt a delightful warmth creeping over him.

"Well, how are you getting along, my lad?" Mihas started. But it was only Ivan Simonovich.

He was looking at Mihas with a smile.

"You see," he said after a brief pause, "you've got to be attentive and not let your imagination run away with you when you're working. Our business, my lad, is to keep our minds on the job and not to indulge in fancy dreaming. You and I will never write a book like Quagmire. But this is the sort of thing that will put us to shame."

The foreman's keenness took Mihas' breath away: the "sort of thing" was a tiny oblong spot between the lines.

"I didn't notice it, Comrade Foreman," Mihas said guiltily.

"Never mind, you'll learn to notice these things after you've worked half as long as I have."

Ivan Simonovich stopped the press with a turn of the lever to the left and while he switched on the lamp over the drawn out chase and looked for and eliminated the cause of the "sort of thing" in the space material, Mihas watched the movements of his big, oil-stained hands.

"Comrade Foreman. . . ." . .

"Yes?"

"May I take one of those sheets home? I'd like to. . .

"D'you like to read?" the foreman asked, his eyes on the chase. Evidently he was unaware that he had fanned the warmest spot in the heart of his small assistant.

"Of course!" Mihas said happily. "I read a lot, Comrade Foreman. Look."