nted the trees which have grown them."

Then, turning upon me a keen, good-humoured eye, and chuckling, he
added:

"What about that Nadezhda? Ah, she is a clever woman indeed! Yet I have
a surprise in store for her and her lover."

"Why should you have?"

"Because I desire to benefit mankind at large" (this was said
didactically, and with a frown). "For, no matter where I detect evil or
underhandedness, it is my duty--I feel it to be my duty--to expose that
evil, and to lay it bare. There exist people who need to be taught a
lesson, and to whom I long to cry: 'Sinners that you are, do you lead
more righteous lives!'"

From behind some clouds the sun was rising with a disk as murky and
mournful as the face of an ailing child. It was as though he were
feeling conscious that he had done amiss in so long delaying to shed
light upon the world, in so long dallying on his bed of soft clouds
amid the smoke of the forest fire. But gradually the cheering beams
suffused the garden throughout, and evoked from the ripening fruit an
intoxicating wave of scent in which there could be distinguished also
the bracing breath of autumn.

Simultaneously there rose into the sky, in the wake of the sun, a dense
stratum of cloud which, blue and snow-white in colour, lay with its
soft hummocks reflected in the calm Oka, and so wrought therein a
secondary firmament as profound and impalpable as its original.

"Now then, Makar!" was Gubin's command, and once more I posted myself
at the bottom of the well. About three sazheni in depth, and lined with
cold, damp mud to above the level of my middle, the orifice was charged
with a stifling odour both of rotten wood and of something more
intolerable still. Also, whenever I had filled the pail with mud, and
then emptied it into the bucket and shouted "Right away!" the bucket
would start swinging against my person and bumping it, as unwillingly
it went aloft, and thereafter discharge upon my head and shoulders
clots of filth and drippings of water--meanwhile screening, with its
circular bottom, the glowing sun and now scarce visible stars. In
passing, the spectacle of those stars' waning both pained and cheered
me, for it meant that for a companion in the firmament they now had the
sun. Hence it was until my neck felt almost fractured, and my spine and
the nape of my neck were aching as though clamped in a cast of plaster
of paris, that I kept my eyes turned aloft. Yes, anything to gain a
sight