comes to a monastery, and starts railing as soon
as he gets there!"

Flashing his eyes angrily, the black-bearded man lowered his head like
a bull. Then, thinking better of his position, and contenting himself
with a gesture, he strode swiftly, heavily towards the door. Upon this
the Christ-loving pilgrim rose with a swaying motion, bowed to everyone
present, and set about following his late interlocutor.

"It has all come of a broken heart," he said with a smile as he passed
me. Yet somehow the smile seemed to lack sympathy.

With a disapproving air someone else remarked:

"That fellow's one thought is to enlarge and to enlarge upon his tale."

"Yes, and to no purpose does he do so," added the Christ-loving pilgrim
as he halted in the doorway. "All that he accomplishes by it is to
weary himself and others alike. Such experiences are far better put
behind one."

Presently I followed the pair into the forecourt, and near the
entrance-gates heard a voice say quietly:

"Do not disturb yourself, good father."

"Nevertheless" (the second voice was that of the porter of the
monastery, Father Seraphim, a strapping Vetlugan) "a spectre walks here
nightly."

"Never mind if it does. As regards myself, no spectre would touch me."

Here I moved in the direction of the gates.

"Who comes there?" Seraphim inquired as he thrust a hairy and uncouth,
but infinitely kindly, face close to mine. "Oh, it is the young fellow
from Nizhni Novgorod! You are wasting your time, my good sir, for the
women have all gone to bed."

With which he laughed and chuckled like a bear.

Beyond the wall of the forecourt the stillness of the autumn night was
the languid inertia of a world exhausted by summer, and the withered
grass and other objects of the season were exhaling a sweet and bracing
odour, and the trees looking like fragments of cloud where motionless
they hung in the moist, sultry air. Also, in the darkness the
half-slumbering sea could be heard soughing as it crept towards the
shore while over the sky lay a canopy of mist, save at the point where
the moon's opal-like blur could be descried over the spot where that
blur's counterfeit image glittered and rocked on the surface of the
dark waters.

Under the trees there was set a bench whereon I could discern there to
be resting a human figure. Approaching the figure, I seated myself
beside it.

"Whence, comrade?" was my inquiry.

"From Voronezh. And you?"

A Russian is nev