weaker, mixed up his experiences
with his imaginations and become unable to distinguish one from the
other? Anything is possible, but it is strange that on this occasion
and for the rest of the journey, whenever he happened to tell a
story, he gave unmistakable preference to fiction, and never told
of what he really had experienced. At the time Yegorushka took it
all for the genuine thing, and believed every word; later on it
seemed to him strange that a man who in his day had travelled all
over Russia and seen and known so much, whose wife and children had
been burnt to death, so failed to appreciate the wealth of his life
that whenever he was sitting by the camp fire he was either silent
or talked of what had never been.

Over their porridge they were all silent, thinking of what they had
just heard. Life is terrible and marvellous, and so, however terrible
a story you tell in Russia, however you embroider it with nests of
robbers, long knives and such marvels, it always finds an echo of
reality in the soul of the listener, and only a man who has been a
good deal affected by education looks askance distrustfully, and
even he will be silent. The cross by the roadside, the dark bales
of wool, the wide expanse of the plain, and the lot of the men
gathered together by the camp fire--all this was of itself so
marvellous and terrible that the fantastic colours of legend and
fairy-tale were pale and blended with life.

All the others ate out of the cauldron, but Panteley sat apart and
ate his porridge out of a wooden bowl. His spoon was not like those
the others had, but was made of cypress wood, with a little cross
on it. Yegorushka, looking at him, thought of the little ikon glass
and asked Styopka softly:

"Why does Grandfather sit apart?"

"He is an Old Believer," Styopka and Vassya answered in a whisper.
And as they said it they looked as though they were speaking of
some secret vice or weakness.

All sat silent, thinking. After the terrible stories there was no
inclination to speak of ordinary things. All at once in the midst
of the silence Vassya drew himself up and, fixing his lustreless
eyes on one point, pricked up his ears.

"What is it?" Dymov asked him.

"Someone is coming," answered Vassya.

"Where do you see him?"

"Yo-on-der! There's something white. . ."

There was nothing to be seen but darkness in the direction in which
Vassya was looking; everyone listened, but they could hear no sound
of s