soners. Avdeyev was told to get
up and go.

Now he understood that he was found guilty and in charge of the
police, but he was not frightened nor amazed; such a turmoil was
going on in his stomach that he could not think about his guards.

"So they won't let us go back to the hotel?" he asked one of his
companions. "But I have three roubles and an untouched quarter of
a pound of tea in my room there."

He spent the night at the police station; all night he was aware
of a loathing for fish, and was thinking about the three roubles
and the quarter of a pound of tea. Early in the morning, when the
sky was beginning to turn blue, he was told to dress and set off.
Two soldiers with bayonets took him to prison. Never before had the
streets of the town seemed to him so long and endless. He walked
not on the pavement but in the middle of the road in the muddy,
thawing snow. His inside was still at war with the fish, his left
leg was numb; he had forgotten his goloshes either in the court or
in the police station, and his feet felt frozen.

Five days later all the prisoners were brought before the court
again to hear their sentence. Avdeyev learnt that he was sentenced
to exile in the province of Tobolsk. And that did not frighten nor
amaze him either. He fancied for some reason that the trial was not
yet over, that there were more adjournments to come, and that the
final decision had not been reached yet. . . . He went on in the
prison expecting this final decision every day.

Only six months later, when his wife and his son Vassily came to
say good-bye to him, and when in the wasted, wretchedly dressed old
woman he scarcely recognized his once fat and dignified Elizaveta
Trofimovna, and when he saw his son wearing a short, shabby
reefer-jacket and cotton trousers instead of the high-school uniform,
he realized that his fate was decided, and that whatever new
"decision" there might be, his past would never come back to him.
And for the first time since the trial and his imprisonment the
angry expression left his face, and he wept bitterly.

FROST

A "POPULAR" fete with a philanthropic object had been arranged on
the Feast of Epiphany in the provincial town of N----. They had
selected a broad part of the river between the market and the
bishop's palace, fenced it round with a rope, with fir-trees and
with flags, and provided everything necessary for skating, sledging,
and tobogganing. The festivity was organized on t