They have not relieved you yet?" I asked in surprise.

"Me?" he answered, turning to me his chilled and dewy face with a
smile. "There is no one to take my place now till morning. They'll
all be going to the Father Archimandrite's to break the fast
directly."

With the help of a little peasant in a hat of reddish fur that
looked like the little wooden tubs in which honey is sold, he threw
his weight on the rope; they gasped simultaneously, and the ferry
started.

We floated across, disturbing on the way the lazily rising mist.
Everyone was silent. Ieronim worked mechanically with one hand. He
slowly passed his mild lustreless eyes over us; then his glance
rested on the rosy face of a young merchant's wife with black
eyebrows, who was standing on the ferry beside me silently shrinking
from the mist that wrapped her about. He did not take his eyes off
her face all the way.

There was little that was masculine in that prolonged gaze. It
seemed to me that Ieronim was looking in the woman's face for the
soft and tender features of his dead friend.

A NIGHTMARE

Kunin, a young man of thirty, who was a permanent member of the
Rural Board, on returning from Petersburg to his district, Borisovo,
immediately sent a mounted messenger to Sinkino, for the priest
there, Father Yakov Smirnov.

Five hours later Father Yakov appeared.

"Very glad to make your acquaintance," said Kunin, meeting him in
the entry. "I've been living and serving here for a year; it seems
as though we ought to have been acquainted before. You are very
welcome! But . . . how young you are!" Kunin added in surprise.
"What is your age?"

"Twenty-eight, . . ." said Father Yakov, faintly pressing Kunin's
outstretched hand, and for some reason turning crimson.

Kunin led his visitor into his study and began looking at him more
attentively.

"What an uncouth womanish face!" he thought.

There certainly was a good deal that was womanish in Father Yakov's
face: the turned-up nose, the bright red cheeks, and the large
grey-blue eyes with scanty, scarcely perceptible eyebrows. His long
reddish hair, smooth and dry, hung down in straight tails on to his
shoulders. The hair on his upper lip was only just beginning to
form into a real masculine moustache, while his little beard belonged
to that class of good-for-nothing beards which among divinity
students are for some reason called "ticklers." It was scanty and
extremely transparent; it could not have