, and to condemn
him to penal servitude. Only the time spent on performing certain
formalities for which the judge is paid his salary, and then--it
is all over. Then you may look in vain for justice and protection
in this dirty, wretched little town a hundred and fifty miles from
a railway station! And, indeed, is it not absurd even to think of
justice when every kind of violence is accepted by society as a
rational and consistent necessity, and every act of mercy--for
instance, a verdict of acquittal--calls forth a perfect outburst
of dissatisfied and revengeful feeling?

In the morning Ivan Dmitritch got up from his bed in a state of
horror, with cold perspiration on his forehead, completely convinced
that he might be arrested any minute. Since his gloomy thoughts of
yesterday had haunted him so long, he thought, it must be that there
was some truth in them. They could not, indeed, have come into his
mind without any grounds whatever.

A policeman walking slowly passed by the windows: that was not for
nothing. Here were two men standing still and silent near the house.
Why were they silent? And agonizing days and nights followed for
Ivan Dmitritch. Everyone who passed by the windows or came into the
yard seemed to him a spy or a detective. At midday the chief of the
police usually drove down the street with a pair of horses; he was
going from his estate near the town to the police department; but
Ivan Dmitritch fancied every time that he was driving especially
quickly, and that he had a peculiar expression: it was evident that
he was in haste to announce that there was a very important criminal
in the town. Ivan Dmitritch started at every ring at the bell and
knock at the gate, and was agitated whenever he came upon anyone
new at his landlady's; when he met police officers and gendarmes
he smiled and began whistling so as to seem unconcerned. He could
not sleep for whole nights in succession expecting to be arrested,
but he snored loudly and sighed as though in deep sleep, that his
landlady might think he was asleep; for if he could not sleep it
meant that he was tormented by the stings of conscience--what a
piece of evidence! Facts and common sense persuaded him that all
these terrors were nonsense and morbidity, that if one looked at
the matter more broadly there was nothing really terrible in arrest
and imprisonment--so long as the conscience is at ease; but the
more sensibly and logically he reasoned, the more