nd calendars. At home he always read lying
down.

III

One autumn morning Ivan Dmitritch, turning up the collar of his
greatcoat and splashing through the mud, made his way by side-streets
and back lanes to see some artisan, and to collect some payment
that was owing. He was in a gloomy mood, as he always was in the
morning. In one of the side-streets he was met by two convicts in
fetters and four soldiers with rifles in charge of them. Ivan
Dmitritch had very often met convicts before, and they had always
excited feelings of compassion and discomfort in him; but now this
meeting made a peculiar, strange impression on him. It suddenly
seemed to him for some reason that he, too, might be put into fetters
and led through the mud to prison like that. After visiting the
artisan, on the way home he met near the post office a police
superintendent of his acquaintance, who greeted him and walked a
few paces along the street with him, and for some reason this seemed
to him suspicious. At home he could not get the convicts or the
soldiers with their rifles out of his head all day, and an unaccountable
inward agitation prevented him from reading or concentrating his
mind. In the evening he did not light his lamp, and at night he
could not sleep, but kept thinking that he might be arrested, put
into fetters, and thrown into prison. He did not know of any harm
he had done, and could be certain that he would never be guilty of
murder, arson, or theft in the future either; but was it not easy
to commit a crime by accident, unconsciously, and was not false
witness always possible, and, indeed, miscarriage of justice? It
was not without good reason that the agelong experience of the
simple people teaches that beggary and prison are ills none can be
safe from. A judicial mistake is very possible as legal proceedings
are conducted nowadays, and there is nothing to be wondered at in
it. People who have an official, professional relation to other
men's sufferings--for instance, judges, police officers, doctors
--in course of time, through habit, grow so callous that they
cannot, even if they wish it, take any but a formal attitude to
their clients; in this respect they are not different from the
peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in the back-yard, and does
not notice the blood. With this formal, soulless attitude to human
personality the judge needs but one thing--time--in order to
deprive an innocent man of all rights of property