turn will come! I
shall not live to see it, I shall perish, but some people's
great-grandsons will see it. I greet them with all my heart and
rejoice, rejoice with them! Onward! God be your help, friends!"

With shining eyes Ivan Dmitritch got up, and stretching his hands
towards the window, went on with emotion in his voice:

"From behind these bars I bless you! Hurrah for truth and justice!
I rejoice!"

"I see no particular reason to rejoice," said Andrey Yefimitch, who
thought Ivan Dmitritch's movement theatrical, though he was delighted
by it. "Prisons and madhouses there will not be, and truth, as you
have just expressed it, will triumph; but the reality of things,
you know, will not change, the laws of nature will still remain the
same. People will suffer pain, grow old, and die just as they do
now. However magnificent a dawn lighted up your life, you would yet
in the end be nailed up in a coffin and thrown into a hole."

"And immortality?"

"Oh, come, now!"

"You don't believe in it, but I do. Somebody in Dostoevsky or
Voltaire said that if there had not been a God men would have
invented him. And I firmly believe that if there is no immortality
the great intellect of man will sooner or later invent it."

"Well said," observed Andrey Yefimitch, smiling with pleasure; its
a good thing you have faith. With such a belief one may live happily
even shut up within walls. You have studied somewhere, I presume?"

"Yes, I have been at the university, but did not complete my studies."

"You are a reflecting and a thoughtful man. In any surroundings you
can find tranquillity in yourself. Free and deep thinking which
strives for the comprehension of life, and complete contempt for
the foolish bustle of the world--those are two blessings beyond
any that man has ever known. And you can possess them even though
you lived behind threefold bars. Diogenes lived in a tub, yet he
was happier than all the kings of the earth."

"Your Diogenes was a blockhead," said Ivan Dmitritch morosely. "Why
do you talk to me about Diogenes and some foolish comprehension of
life?" he cried, growing suddenly angry and leaping up. "I love
life; I love it passionately. I have the mania of persecution, a
continual agonizing terror; but I have moments when I am overwhelmed
by the thirst for life, and then I am afraid of going mad. I want
dreadfully to live, dreadfully!"

He walked up and down the ward in agitation, and said, dropping his