med into an animal waiting to be
slaughtered, a deaf-mute object which may be taken from place to place,
burnt and broken. It matters not what he might say, nobody would listen
to his words, and if he endeavored to shout, they would stop his mouth
with a rag. Whether he can walk alone or not, they will take him away
and hang him.

And if he should offer resistance, struggle or lie down on the
ground--they will overpower him, lift him, bind him and carry him,
bound, to the gallows. And the fact that this machine-like work will
be performed over him by human beings like himself, lent to them a new,
extraordinary and ominous aspect--they seemed to him like ghosts that
came to him for this one purpose, or like automatic puppets on springs.
They would seize him, take him, carry him, hang him, pull him by the
feet. They would cut the rope, take him down, carry him off and bury
him.

From the first day of his imprisonment the people and life seemed to
him to have turned into an incomprehensibly terrible world of phantoms
and automatic puppets. Almost maddened with fear, he attempted to
picture to himself that human beings had tongues and that they could
speak, but he could not--they seemed to him to be mute. He tried to
recall their speech, the meaning of the words that people used in their
relations with one another--but he could not. Their mouths seemed
to open, some sounds were heard; then they moved their feet and
disappeared. And nothing more.

Thus would a man feel if he were at night alone in his house and
suddenly all objects were to come to life, start to move and overpower
him. And suddenly they would all begin to judge him: the cupboard, the
chair, the writing-table and the divan. He would cry and toss about,
entreating, calling for help, while they would speak among themselves in
their own language, and then would lead him to the scaffold,--they, the
cupboard, the chair, the writing-table and the divan. And the other
objects would look on.

To Vasily Kashirin, who was condemned to death by hanging, everything
now seemed like children's playthings: his cell, the door with the
peephole, the strokes of the wound-up clock, the carefully molded
fortress, and especially that mechanical puppet with the gun who stamped
his feet in the corridor, and the others who, frightening him, peeped
into his cell through the little window and handed him the food in
silence. And that which he was experiencing was not the fear of