of his intonation had an
irresistible persuasiveness.

His physical strength and agility during the first days of his
imprisonment were such that he seemed not to know what fatigue and
sickness meant. Every night before lying down, he said: "Lord, lay me
down as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!" and every morning on getting
up, he said: "I lay down and curled up, I get up and shake myself." And
indeed he only had to lie down, to fall asleep like a stone, and he
only had to shake himself, to be ready without a moment's delay for some
work, just as children are ready to play directly they awake. He could
do everything, not very well but not badly. He baked, cooked, sewed,
planed, and mended boots. He was always busy, and only at night allowed
himself conversation--of which he was fond--and songs. He did not sing
like a trained singer who knows he is listened to, but like the birds,
evidently giving vent to the sounds in the same way that one stretches
oneself or walks about to get rid of stiffness, and the sounds were
always high-pitched, mournful, delicate, and almost feminine, and his
face at such times was very serious.

Having been taken prisoner and allowed his beard to grow, he seemed to
have thrown off all that had been forced upon him--everything military
and alien to himself--and had returned to his former peasant habits.

"A soldier on leave--a shirt outside breeches," he would say.

He did not like talking about his life as a soldier, though he did not
complain, and often mentioned that he had not been flogged once during
the whole of his army service. When he related anything it was generally
some old and evidently precious memory of his "Christian" life, as he
called his peasant existence. The proverbs, of which his talk was full,
were for the most part not the coarse and indecent saws soldiers
employ, but those folk sayings which taken without a context seem so
insignificant, but when used appositely suddenly acquire a significance
of profound wisdom.

He would often say the exact opposite of what he had said on a previous
occasion, yet both would be right. He liked to talk and he talked well,
adorning his speech with terms of endearment and with folk sayings which
Pierre thought he invented himself, but the chief charm of his talk lay
in the fact that the commonest events--sometimes just such as Pierre
had witnessed without taking notice of them--assumed in Karataev's a
character of solemn fitness.