ying
with her fingers or plaiting and unplaiting her hair. "But I don't
look upon this happiness of mine as something that has come to me
by chance, as though it had dropped from heaven. This happiness is
a perfectly natural, consistent, logical consequence. I believe
that man is the creator of his own happiness, and now I am enjoying
just what I have myself created. Yes, I speak without false modesty:
I have created this happiness myself and I have a right to it. You
know my past. My unhappy childhood, without father or mother; my
depressing youth, poverty--all this was a struggle, all this was
the path by which I made my way to happiness. . . ."

In October the school sustained a heavy loss: Ippolit Ippolititch
was taken ill with erysipelas on the head and died. For two days
before his death he was unconscious and delirious, but even in his
delirium he said nothing that was not perfectly well known to every
one.

"The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. . . . Horses eat oats and
hay. . . ."

There were no lessons at the high school on the day of his funeral.
His colleagues and pupils were the coffin-bearers, and the school
choir sang all the way to the grave the anthem "Holy God." Three
priests, two deacons, all his pupils and the staff of the boys'
high school, and the bishop's choir in their best kaftans, took
part in the procession. And passers-by who met the solemn procession,
crossed themselves and said:

"God grant us all such a death."

Returning home from the cemetery much moved, Nikitin got out his
diary from the table and wrote:

"We have just consigned to the tomb Ippolit Ippolititch Ryzhitsky.
Peace to your ashes, modest worker! Masha, Varya, and all the women
at the funeral, wept from genuine feeling, perhaps because they
knew this uninteresting, humble man had never been loved by a woman.
I wanted to say a warm word at my colleague's grave, but I was
warned that this might displease the director, as he did not like
our poor friend. I believe that this is the first day since my
marriage that my heart has been heavy."

There was no other event of note in the scholastic year.

The winter was mild, with wet snow and no frost; on Epiphany Eve,
for instance, the wind howled all night as though it were autumn,
and water trickled off the roofs; and in the morning, at the ceremony
of the blessing of the water, the police allowed no one to go on
the river, because they said the ice was swelling up and lo