Explore "In Two Moods" by Vladimir Korolenko on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I well remember the peculiar mood I was in at that time.
When I was a child, my greatest though forbidden delight was to go secretly into a wretched little shop and buy a sausage for three-half pence. Long afterwards, as a grown-up man, I hunted all the great provision shops in St. Petersburg for just such another sausage -- one with the same flavor, but I never found what I sought. Sometimes, in the mingled odors of a sausage shop, I half recognized that particular smell, yet all the same I could not find it. That is quite natural: what I was really looking for were my childhood and the keen appetite of my infant years, and naturally I could not find them. If my simile seems to you too prosaic, change the sausage into an apple, or a peach, or anything you like. The fact remains the same. And this is why I mention it: every period of life has its own special flavor, the particular character of which we do not notice at the time. But so soon as the present is become the past and has moved a little way off from us, these peculiar characteristics of life stand out clear and call us back to them; where upon we regret the past, and wonder how it was we took so little notice of the enchanted atmosphere while it was round us, and failed to enjoy it consciously and to the full.