et am I!' while he who makes a parade of his hard lot,
and says, 'Good folk, see ye and hear how bitter my life is,' also does
wrong."

Here a pilgrim with a black beard, a brigand's dark eyes, and the
wasted features of an ascetic rose from the further side of the table,
straightened his virile frame, and said in a dull voice:

"My wife and one of my children were burnt to death through the falling
of an oil lamp. On THAT ought I to keep silence?"

No answer followed. Only someone muttered to himself:

"What? Again?": until the first speaker, the speaker seated near the
corner of the table, launched into the oppressive lull the unhesitating
reply:

"That of which you speak may be taken to have been a punishment by God
for sin."

"What? For a sin committed by one three years of age (for, indeed, my
little son was no more)? The accident happened of his pulling down a
lamp upon himself, and of my wife seizing him, and herself being burnt
to death. She was weak, too, for but eleven days had passed since her
confinement."

"No. What I mean is that in that accident you see a punishment for sins
committed by the child's father and mother."

This reply from the corner came with perfect confidence. The
black-bearded man, however, pretended not to hear it, but spread out
his hands as though parting the air before him, and proceeded
hurriedly, breathlessly to detail the manner in which his wife and
little one had met their deaths. And all the time that he was doing so
one had an inkling that often before had he recounted his narrative of
horror, and that often again would he repeat it. His shaggy black
eyebrows, as he delivered his speech, met in a single strip, while the
whites of his eyes grew bloodshot, and their dull, black pupils never
ceased their nervous twitching.

Presently the gloomy recital was once more roughly, unceremoniously
broken in upon by the cheerful voice of the Christ-loving pilgrim.

"It is not right, brother," the voice said, "to blame God for untoward
accidents, or for mistakes and follies committed by ourselves."

"But if God be God, He is responsible for all things."

"Not so. Concede to yourself the faculty of reason."

"Pah! What avails reason if it cannot make me understand?"

"Cannot make you understand WHAT?"

"The main point, the point why MY wife had to be burnt rather than my
neighbour's?"

Somewhere an old woman commented in spitefully distinct tones:

"Oh ho, ho! This man