d even
to hang down. His eyes became sleepy, and all his motions were now
so slow and languid as though each turn of the head, each move of
the fingers, each step of the foot were a complicated and cumbersome
undertaking which required very careful deliberation. At night he lay
on his cot, but did not close his eyes, and thus, heavy with sleep, they
remained open until morning.

"Aha!" said the warden with satisfaction, seeing him on the following
day. "This is no dramshop for you, my dear!"

With a feeling of pleasant gratification, like a scientist whose
experiment had proved successful again, he examined the condemned man
closely and carefully from head to foot. Now everything would go along
as necessary. Satan was disgraced, the sacredness of the prison and the
execution was re-established, and the old man inquired condescendingly,
even with a feeling of sincere pity:

"Do you want to meet somebody or not?"

"What for?"

"Well, to say good-by! Have you no mother, for instance, or a brother?"

"I must not be hanged," said Yanson softly, and looked askance at the
warden. "I don't want to be hanged."

The warden looked at him and waved his hand in silence.

Toward evening Yanson grew somewhat calmer.

The day had been so ordinary, the cloudy winter sky looked so ordinary,
the footsteps of people and their conversation on matters of business
sounded so ordinary, the smell of the sour soup of cabbage was so
ordinary, customary and natural that he again ceased believing in the
execution. But the night became terrible to him. Before this Yanson had
felt the night simply as darkness, as an especially dark time, when
it was necessary to go to sleep, but now he began to be aware of its
mysterious and uncanny nature. In order not to believe in death, it was
necessary to hear and see and feel ordinary things about him, footsteps,
voices, light, the soup of sour cabbage. But in the dark everything was
unnatural; the silence and the darkness were in themselves something
like death.

And the longer the night dragged the more dreadful it became. With
the ignorant innocence of a child or a savage, who believe everything
possible, Yanson felt like crying to the sun: "Shine!" He begged, he
implored that the sun should shine, but the night drew its long, dark
hours remorselessly over the earth, and there was no power that could
hasten its course. And this impossibility, arising for the first time
before the weak consciousn