ack, very much moved and making the sign of the cross.

"Ah! my brothers," he says, "I am all upset. The doctor made me sit
down in a chair and said to the students: 'Here you see a sick man.'
Ah! how painful it was to hear him add: 'He was a deacon!'"

"The unfortunate man stopped, and continued in a choking voice: '"He
was a deacon," the doctor told them. He told them the story of my
whole life, he even spoke about my wife. It was terrible! One would
have said that I was dead already, and that he was talking over my
coffin.'

"And as the deacon is thus speaking, all of the others see clearly
that he is going to die. They see it as clearly as if death itself
was standing there, at the foot of the bed...."

The merchant is a very different sort of man: he does not believe in
God; he has had enough of life and is not afraid of death. All of
his strength he has spent unnecessarily, without any appreciable
result, without joy. When he was young he had stolen meat and fruit
from his master. Caught in the act, he had been beaten, and he
detested those who had struck him. Later on, having become rich, he
crushed the poor with his fortune and scorned those who, on falling
into his hands, answered his hate with scorn. Finally, old age and
sickness had come; people now began to steal from him, and he, in
turn, beat those whom he caught terribly. And thus his life had been
spent; it had been nothing but a series of transgressions and
hatreds, where the flames of desire, in dying out, had left nothing
but cold ashes in his soul. He refuses to believe that any one can
love this existence, and he disdainfully looks at the sallow face of
the deacon, and mutters: "Fool!" Then, he looks at the third man in
the room, a young student who is asleep. This student never fails to
embrace his fiancee, a pretty young girl, whenever she comes to see
him. As he looks the merchant, more bitterly than before, repeats:
"Fool!"

But death approaches; and this man who thinks himself superior and
who scorns the deacon because he dreams of light and the sun, now
feels disturbed in his turn. In making up the balance-sheet of this
existence which, up to this time, he believed he hated, he remembers
a stream of warm light which, during the day, used to come in
through the window and gild the ceiling; and he remembers how the
sun used to shine on the banks of the Volga, near his home. With a
terrible sob, beating his hands on his breast, he falls bac