And the Yeah, Welcome back everyone to one thousand one classic short stories entails. As we begin to enter the fall

season all the school teachers are going back to work and leaving their summers and

their dreams behind. Perhaps the famous Russian author Anton Chekopf was thinking the same thing

a little over a hundred years ago when he wrote, The School Mistress. And that's our story today.

Hope you enjoy it.

At half past eight, they drove out of the town.

The high road was dry. A lovely April sun was shining warmly,

but the snow was still lying in the ditches and in the woods.

Winter, dark, long, and spiteful was hardly over.

Spring had come all of a sudden, but neither the warmth nor the languid transparent woods

warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks of birds flying over the huge puddles that were like lakes,

nor the marvelous fathomless sky, into which it seemed one would

have gone away so joyfully presented anything new or interesting to Maria Vassalievnana who was sitting in the cart.

For 13 years she had been schoolmistress and there was no reckoning how many times during all

those years she had been to the town for her salary. And whether it was

spring as now or rainy autumn evening or winter, it was all the same to her and

she always invariably longed for one thing only to get to the end of her journey as quickly

as could be.

She felt as though she had been living in that part of the country for ages and ages for a hundred years and it seemed to her that she

knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Her past was

here, her present was here, and she could imagine no other future than the school

the road to the town and back again and again the school and again the road

...