o Stepan, and he wondered why it had been hidden from him so long.

From that day onward he spent all his free time with Chouev, asking him
questions and listening to him. He saw but a single truth at the bottom
of the teaching of Christ as revealed to him by Chouev: that all men are
brethren, and that they ought to love and pity one another in order that
all might be happy. And when he listened to Chouev, everything that was
consistent with this fundamental truth came to him like a thing he had
known before and only forgotten since, while whatever he heard that
seemed to contradict it, he would take no notice of, as he thought that
he simply had not understood the real meaning. And from that time Stepan
was a different man.

IV

STEPAN had been very submissive and meek ever since he came to
the prison, but now he made the prison authorities and all his
fellow-prisoners wonder at the change in him. Without being ordered, and
out of his proper turn he would do all the very hardest work in prison,
and the dirtiest too. But in spite of his humility, the other prisoners
stood in awe of him, and were afraid of him, as they knew he was a
resolute man, possessed of great physical strength. Their respect for
him increased after the incident of the two tramps who fell upon him; he
wrenched himself loose from them and broke the arm of one of them in the
fight. These tramps had gambled with a young prisoner of some means and
deprived him of all his money. Stepan took his part, and deprived the
tramps of their winnings. The tramps poured their abuse on him; but when
they attacked him, he got the better of them. When the Governor asked
how the fight had come about, the tramps declared that it was Stepan
who had begun it. Stepan did not try to exculpate himself, and bore
patiently his sentence which was three days in the punishment-cell, and
after that solitary confinement.

In his solitary cell he suffered because he could no longer listen to
Chouev and his Gospel. He was also afraid that the former visions of HER
and of the black devils would reappear to torment him. But the visions
were gone for good. His soul was full of new and happy ideas. He felt
glad to be alone if only he could read, and if he had the Gospel. He
knew that he might have got hold of the Gospel, but he could not read.

He had started to learn the alphabet in his boyhood, but could not grasp
the joining of the syllables, and remained illiterate. He made up