e, an excellent
woman, but five years of this kind of life landed her in the grave."

He emptied the glass of tea at one gulp, and continued his narrative.
He enumerated the years and months he had passed in prison and in
exile, told of various accidents and misfortunes, of the slaughters in
prisons, and of hunger in Siberia. The mother looked at him, listened
with wonderment to the simple way in which he spoke of this life, so
full of suffering, of persecution, of wrong, and abuse of men.

"Well, let's get down to business!"

His voice changed, and his face grew more serious. He asked questions
about the way in which the mother intended to smuggle the literature
into the factory, and she marveled at his clear knowledge of all the
details.

Then they returned to reminiscences of their native village. He joked,
and her mind roved thoughtfully through her past. It seemed to her
strangely like a quagmire uniformly strewn with hillocks, which were
covered with poplars trembling in constant fear; with low firs, and
with white birches straying between the hillocks. The birches grew
slowly, and after standing for five years on the unstable, putrescent
soil, they dried up, fell down, and rotted away. She looked at this
picture, and a vague feeling of insufferable sadness overcame her. The
figure of a girl with a sharp, determined face stood before her. Now
the figure walks somewhere in the darkness amid the snowflakes,
solitary, weary. And her son sits in a little cell, with iron gratings
over the window. Perhaps he is not yet asleep, and is thinking. But
he is thinking not of his mother. He has one nearer to him than
herself. Heavy, chaotic thoughts, like a tangled mass of clouds, crept
over her, and encompassed her and oppressed her bosom.

"You are tired, granny! Let's go to bed!" said Yegor, smiling.

She bade him good night, and sidled carefully into the kitchen,
carrying away a bitter, caustic feeling in her heart.

In the morning, after breakfast, Yegor asked her:

"Suppose they catch you and ask you where you got all these heretical
books from. What will you say?"

"I'll say, 'It's none of your business!'" she answered, smiling.

"You'll never convince them of that!" Yegor replied confidently. "On
the contrary, they are profoundly convinced that this is precisely
their business. They will question you very, very diligently, and
very, very long!"

"I won't tell, though!"

"They'll put you in