l you let me help you?" I said, approaching him.

He looked at me for a moment and turned away again. Yet the expression
of pain in his eyes showed that his coldness was not the result of
indifference, but rather of sincere and concentrated sorrow.

"God sees and knows everything," he said at length, raising himself to
his full height and drawing a deep sigh. "Yes, Nicolinka," he went on,
observing, the expression of sincere pity on my face, "my fate has been
an unhappy one from the cradle, and will continue so to the grave. The
good that I have done to people has always been repaid with evil; yet,
though I shall receive no reward here, I shall find one THERE" (he
pointed upwards). "Ah, if only you knew my whole story, and all that I
have endured in this life!--I who have been a bootmaker, a soldier, a
deserter, a factory hand, and a teacher! Yet now--now I am nothing, and,
like the Son of Man, have nowhere to lay my head." Sitting down upon a
chair, he covered his eyes with his hand.

Seeing that he was in the introspective mood in which a man pays
no attention to his listener as he cons over his secret thoughts, I
remained silent, and, seating myself upon the bed, continued to watch
his kind face.

"You are no longer a child. You can understand things now, and I will
tell you my whole story and all that I have undergone. Some day, my
children, you may remember the old friend who loved you so much--"

He leant his elbow upon the table by his side, took a pinch of snuff,
and, in the peculiarly measured, guttural tone in which he used to
dictate us our lessons, began the story of his career.

Since he many times in later years repeated the whole to me
again--always in the same order, and with the same expressions and
the same unvarying intonation--I will try to render it literally, and
without omitting the innumerable grammatical errors into which he always
strayed when speaking in Russian. Whether it was really the history of
his life, or whether it was the mere product of his imagination--that
is to say, some narrative which he had conceived during his lonely
residence in our house, and had at last, from endless repetition, come
to believe in himself--or whether he was adorning with imaginary facts
the true record of his career, I have never quite been able to make
out. On the one hand, there was too much depth of feeling and practical
consistency in its recital for it to be wholly incredible, while, on the
other