rch the president of the court asked him:

"Are you a dissenter?"

"I can't tell," he answered.

He had no religion at all now; he knew nothing and understood
nothing; and his old belief was hateful to him now, and seemed to
him darkness and folly. Aglaia was not in the least subdued, and
she still went on abusing the dead man, blaming him for all their
misfortunes. Sergey Nikanoritch had grown a beard instead of whiskers.
At the trial he was red and perspiring, and was evidently ashamed
of his grey prison coat and of sitting on the same bench with humble
peasants. He defended himself awkwardly, and, trying to prove that
he had not been to the tavern for a whole year, got into an altercation
with every witness, and the spectators laughed at him. Dashutka had
grown fat in prison. At the trial she did not understand the questions
put to her, and only said that when they killed Uncle Matvey she
was dreadfully frightened, but afterwards she did not mind.

All four were found guilty of murder with mercenary motives. Yakov
Ivanitch was sentenced to penal servitude for twenty years; Aglaia
for thirteen and a half; Sergey Nikanoritch to ten; Dashutka to
six.

VII

Late one evening a foreign steamer stopped in the roads of Due in
Sahalin and asked for coal. The captain was asked to wait till
morning, but he did not want to wait over an hour, saying that if
the weather changed for the worse in the night there would be a
risk of his having to go off without coal. In the Gulf of Tartary
the weather is liable to violent changes in the course of half an
hour, and then the shores of Sahalin are dangerous. And already it
had turned fresh, and there was a considerable sea running.

A gang of convicts were sent to the mine from the Voevodsky prison,
the grimmest and most forbidding of all the prisons in Sahalin. The
coal had to be loaded upon barges, and then they had to be towed
by a steam-cutter alongside the steamer which was anchored more
than a quarter of a mile from the coast, and then the unloading and
reloading had to begin--an exhausting task when the barge kept
rocking against the steamer and the men could scarcely keep on their
legs for sea-sickness. The convicts, only just roused from their
sleep, still drowsy, went along the shore, stumbling in the darkness
and clanking their fetters. On the left, scarcely visible, was a
tall, steep, extremely gloomy-looking cliff, while on the right
there was a thick impenetrable