- Nabokov remembers a long parade of nurses and governesses who helped him and his siblings during their childhood.
- Miss Rachel gives him biscuits even after he's brushed his teeth for the night.
- Miss Clayton helps him collect caterpillars, but they all run away.
- Miss Norcott is beautiful, loses a glove once in France, and is dismissed for reasons lost to time.
- Miss Hunt is dismissed briefly after her hire: under her watch Vladimir and Sergey steal away on a boat down the river, and get pretty far before being discovered.
- Miss Robinson has a pink nose.
- Miss Clayton comes back for a while.
- After the English-speaking tutors fade out, Russian and French teachers take over.
- In order to keep up English, Mr. Burness and Mr. Cummings visit the home but do not live with the Nabokovs.
- Mr. Burness, a Scotsman, criss-crosses the countryside to visit his pupils, and is always late, the day darkening, while Vladimir and Sergey kill time.
- Nabokov remembers this later, in Berlin, as he waits for a chronically late pupil of his own.
- Vladimir sits and waits and watches from his mother's bedroom bay window in St. Petersburg, which looks out onto a square. Later, during the Revolution, he would see battles, and his first dead man.
- But while waiting for Mr. Burness, Vladimir sees only dusk, and snow, and eventually, Mr. Burness' sled.
- "No matter how cold the day was, his good, ruddy face would be sweating abundantly as he strode in." (4.4.7)
- At the end of the lessons, Mr. Burness offers limericks, but squeezes his pupils' hands so tightly that they never get to the end.