ur beard?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Because, if you will pardon me, I think your face would look better
bearded."

With a short laugh he exclaimed:

"Bearded? Ah, sloven! Bearded, indeed!"

To which he added more gravely:

"Both Peter the Great and Nicholas I were wiser than you, for they
ordained that whosoever should be bearded should have his nose slit,
and be fined a hundred roubles. Did you ever hear of that?"

"No."

"And from the same source, from the beard, arose also the Great Schism."

His manner of speaking was too rapid to be articulate, and, in leaving
his mouth, his words caused his lips to bare stumps and gums amid which
they lost their way, became disintegrated, and issued, as it were, in
an incomplete state.

"Everyone," he continued, "knows that life is lived more easily with a
beard than without one, since with a beard lies are more easily
told--they can be told, and then hidden in the masses of hair. Hence we
ought to go through life with our faces naked, since such faces render
untruthfulness more difficult, and prevent their owners from
prevaricating without the fact becoming plain to all."

"But what about women?"

"What about women? Well, women can always lie to their husbands
successfully, but not to all the town, to all the world, to folk in
general. Moreover, since a woman's real business in life is the same as
that of the hen, to rear young, what can it matter if she DOES cackle a
few falsehoods, provided that she be neither a priest nor a mayor nor a
tchinovnik, and does not possess any authority, and cannot establish
laws? For the really important point is that the law itself should not
lie, but ever uphold truth pure and simple. Long has the prevalent
illegality disgusted me."

The door of the shanty was standing open, and amid the outer darkness,
as in a church, the trees looked like pillars, and the white stems of
the birches like silver candelabra tipped with a thousand lights, or
dimly-seen choristers with faces showing pale above sacramental
vestments of black. All my soul was full of a sort of painful
restlessness. It was a feeling as though I should live to rise and go
forth into the darkness, and offer battle to the terrors of the night;
yet ever, as my companion's torrential speech caught and held my
attention, it detained me where I was.

"My father was a man of no little originality and character," he went
on. "Wherefore, none of the townsfolk liked him. By the ag