reached from the pulpit; he
only knew that men ought to force themselves to believe in what he tried
to make himself believe.

Smokovnikov was not shocked by Father Michael's conduct; he only thought
it illustrative of the influence the Church was beginning to exercise
on society, and he told all his friends how his son had been insulted by
the priest.

Seeing not only young minds, but also the elder generation, contaminated
by atheistic tendencies, Father Michael became more and more convinced
of the necessity of fighting those tendencies. The more he condemned the
unbelief of Smokovnikov, and those like him, the more confident he
grew in the firmness of his own faith, and the less he felt the need
of making sure of it, or of bringing his life into harmony with it. His
faith, acknowledged as such by all the world around him, became Father
Michael's very best weapon with which to fight those who denied it.

The thoughts aroused in him by his conflict with Smokovnikov, together
with the annoyance of being blamed by his chiefs in the school, made him
carry out the purpose he had entertained ever since his wife's death--of
taking monastic orders, and of following the course carried out by some
of his fellow-pupils in the academy. One of them was already a bishop,
another an archimandrite and on the way to become a bishop.

At the end of the term Michael Vedensky gave up his post in the school,
took orders under the name of Missael, and very soon got a post as
rector in a seminary in a town on the river Volga.

XIII

MEANWHILE the yard-porter Vassily was marching on the open road down to
the south.

He walked in daytime, and when night came some policeman would get
him shelter in a peasant's cottage. He was given bread everywhere, and
sometimes he was asked to sit down to the evening meal. In a village in
the Orel district, where he had stayed for the night, he heard that
a merchant who had hired the landowner's orchard for the season,
was looking out for strong and able men to serve as watchmen for the
fruit-crops. Vassily was tired of tramping, and as he had also no desire
whatever to go back to his native village, he went to the man who owned
the orchard, and got engaged as watchman for five roubles a month.

Vassily found it very agreeable to live in his orchard shed, and all the
more so when the apples and pears began to grow ripe, and when the men
from the barn supplied him every day with large bundles of f