ady, holding a chair over our heads.

I came out of the church. I wanted to have a look at the dead
Nikolay, the unknown canticle writer. I walked about the monastery
wall, where there was a row of cells, peeped into several windows,
and, seeing nothing, came back again. I do not regret now that I
did not see Nikolay; God knows, perhaps if I had seen him I should
have lost the picture my imagination paints for me now. I imagine
the lovable poetical figure solitary and not understood, who went
out at nights to call to Ieronim over the water, and filled his
hymns with flowers, stars and sunbeams, as a pale timid man with
soft mild melancholy features. His eyes must have shone, not only
with intelligence, but with kindly tenderness and that hardly
restrained childlike enthusiasm which I could hear in Ieronim's
voice when he quoted to me passages from the hymns.

When we came out of church after mass it was no longer night. The
morning was beginning. The stars had gone out and the sky was a
morose greyish blue. The iron slabs, the tombstones and the buds
on the trees were covered with dew There was a sharp freshness in
the air. Outside the precincts I did not find the same animated
scene as I had beheld in the night. Horses and men looked exhausted,
drowsy, scarcely moved, while nothing was left of the tar barrels
but heaps of black ash. When anyone is exhausted and sleepy he
fancies that nature, too, is in the same condition. It seemed to
me that the trees and the young grass were asleep. It seemed as
though even the bells were not pealing so loudly and gaily as at
night. The restlessness was over, and of the excitement nothing was
left but a pleasant weariness, a longing for sleep and warmth.

Now I could see both banks of the river; a faint mist hovered over
it in shifting masses. There was a harsh cold breath from the water.
When I jumped on to the ferry, a chaise and some two dozen men and
women were standing on it already. The rope, wet and as I fancied
drowsy, stretched far away across the broad river and in places
disappeared in the white mist.

"Christ is risen! Is there no one else?" asked a soft voice.

I recognized the voice of Ieronim. There was no darkness now to
hinder me from seeing the monk. He was a tall narrow-shouldered man
of five-and-thirty, with large rounded features, with half-closed
listless-looking eyes and an unkempt wedge-shaped beard. He had an
extraordinarily sad and exhausted look.

"