you in a thousand voices; it will deal you a blow, felling you to the
ground."

Foma, his elbows leaning on the table, attentively listened to his
father, and under the sound of his powerful voice he pictured to himself
now the carpenter squaring a beam, now himself, his hands outstretched,
carefully and stealthily approaching some colossal and living thing, and
desiring to grasp that terrible something.

"A man must preserve himself for his work and must be thoroughly
acquainted with the road to it. A man, dear, is like the pilot on a
ship. In youth, as at high tide, go straight! A way is open to you
everywhere. But you must know when it is time to steer. The waters
recede--here you see a sandbank, there, a rock; it is necessary to know
all this and to slip off in time, in order to reach the harbour safe and
sound."

"I will reach it!" said the boy, looking at his father proudly and with
confidence.

"Eh? You speak courageously!" Ignat burst into laughter. And the aunt
also began to laugh kindly.

Since his trip with his father on the Volga, Foma became more lively and
talkative at home, with his father, with his aunt and with Mayakin. But
on the street, in a new place, or in the presence of strangers, he was
always gloomy, always looking about him with suspicion, as though he
felt something hostile to him everywhere, something hidden from him
spying on him.

At nights he sometimes awoke of a sudden and listened for a long time
to the silence about him, fixedly staring into the dark with wide-open
eyes. And then his father's stories were transformed before him into
images and pictures. Without being aware of it, he mixed up those
stories with his aunt's fairy-tales, thus creating for himself a chaos
of adventures wherein the bright colours of fantasy were whimsically
intertwined with the stern shades of reality. This resulted in something
colossal, incomprehensible; the boy closed his eyes and drove it all
away from him and tried to check the play of his imagination, which
frightened him. In vain he attempted to fall asleep, and the chamber
became more and more crowded with dark images. Then he quietly roused
his aunt.

"Auntie! Auntie!"

"What? Christ be with you."

"I'll come to you," whispered Foma.

"Why? Sleep, darling, sleep."

"I am afraid," confessed the boy.

"You better say to yourself, 'And the Lord will rise again,' then you
won't be afraid."

Foma lies with his eyes open and says the pr