riving to
disunite them, and to space them even as one spaces the words of a song.

Kalinin fidgeted, nudged me, and muttered:

"I find this place too close for me. Always I have hated confinement."

Nevertheless he had taken far more care than I to make himself
comfortable, for he had edged himself right into the hollow, and, by
squatting on his haunches, reduced his frame to the form of a ball.
Moreover, the rain-drippings scarcely or in no wise touched him, while,
in general, he appeared to have developed to the full an aptitude for
vagrancy as a permanent condition, and for the allowing of no
unpleasant circumstance to debar him from invariably finding the most
convenient vantage-ground at a given juncture. Presently, in fact, he
continued:

"Yes; despite the rain and cold and everything else, I consider life to
be not quite intolerable."

"Not quite intolerable in what?"

"Not quite intolerable in the fact that at least I am bound to the
service of no one save God. For if disagreeablenesses have to be
endured, at all events they come better from Him than from one's own
species."

"Then you have no great love for your own species?"

"One loves one's neighbour as the dog loves the stick." To which, after
a pause, the speaker added:

"For WHY should I love him?"

It puzzled me to cite a reason off-hand, but, fortunately, Kalinin did
not wait for an answer--rather, he went on to ask:

"Have you ever been a footman?"

"No," I replied.

"Then let me tell you that it is peculiarly difficult for a footman to
love his neighbour."

"Wherefore?"

"Go and be a footman; THEN you will know. In fact, it is never the case
that, if one serves a man, one can love that man.... How steadily
the rain persists!"

Indeed, on every hand there was in progress a trickling and a splashing
sound as though the weeping earth were venting soft, sorrowful sobs
over the departure of summer before winter and its storms should arrive.

"How come you to be travelling the Caucasus?" I asked at length.

"Merely through the fact that my walking and walking has brought me
hither," was the reply. "For that matter, everyone ends by heading for
the Caucasus."

"Why so?"

"Why NOT, seeing that from one's earliest years one hears of nothing
but the Caucasus, the Caucasus? Why, even our old General used to harp
upon the name, with his moustache bristling, and his eyes protruding,
as he did so. And the same as regards my mother, who