ad five lofty light rooms;
in his study he had a new writing-table, lots of books. He had read
a great deal and often written. And he remembered how he had pined
for his native land, how a blind beggar woman had played the guitar
under his window every day and sung of love, and how, as he listened,
he had always for some reason thought of the past. But eight years
had passed and he had been called back to Russia, and now he was a
suffragan bishop, and all the past had retreated far away into the
mist as though it were a dream. . . .

Father Sisoy came into the bedroom with a candle.

"I say!" he said, wondering, "are you asleep already, your holiness?"

"What is it?"

"Why, it's still early, ten o'clock or less. I bought a candle
to-day; I wanted to rub you with tallow."

"I am in a fever . . ." said the bishop, and he sat up. "I really
ought to have something. My head is bad. . . ."

Sisoy took off the bishop's shirt and began rubbing his chest and
back with tallow.

"That's the way . . . that's the way . . ." he said. "Lord Jesus
Christ . . . that's the way. I walked to the town to-day; I was at
what's-his-name's--the chief priest Sidonsky's. . . . I had tea
with him. I don't like him. Lord Jesus Christ. . . . That's the
way. I don't like him."

III

The bishop of the diocese, a very fat old man, was ill with rheumatism
or gout, and had been in bed for over a month. Bishop Pyotr went
to see him almost every day, and saw all who came to ask his help.
And now that he was unwell he was struck by the emptiness, the
triviality of everything which they asked and for which they wept;
he was vexed at their ignorance, their timidity; and all this
useless, petty business oppressed him by the mass of it, and it
seemed to him that now he understood the diocesan bishop, who had
once in his young days written on "The Doctrines of the Freedom of
the Will," and now seemed to be all lost in trivialities, to have
forgotten everything, and to have no thoughts of religion. The
bishop must have lost touch with Russian life while he was abroad;
he did not find it easy; the peasants seemed to him coarse, the
women who sought his help dull and stupid, the seminarists and their
teachers uncultivated and at times savage. And the documents coming
in and going out were reckoned by tens of thousands; and what
documents they were! The higher clergy in the whole diocese gave
the priests, young and old, and even their wives and children