Nică's prayer book

Narration text

In the middle of the room there are two small tables. The low one, with four little stools, was where the family ate. On the taller one, in a place of honour, lies the ceaslov, the prayer book from which Ion Creangă learned to read at the village school in Humulești.

The moment you see it, one of the funniest scenes of the Childhood Memories comes to mind: when the priest and the teacher were away, the boys sat in the churchyard with their prayer books open; the pages were rather greasy, so flies and bumblebees settled on them, and when the boys snapped the books shut, "ten or twenty souls perished at once – a flood upon the heads of the flies!" The priest was not at all pleased to see the stained books, and he "comforted" the pupils with Saint Nicholas, as the children called the whip kept on the table. Creangă later became a teacher and textbook author himself.

Perhaps the humour with which he recalled school made him a gentler teacher.