e it
ended, far below on the sandy shore, low waves were languidly foaming
and softly purring. The sea was as majestic, as infinite, and as
forbidding as seven years before when I left the high school and
went from my native town to the capital; in the distance there was
a dark streak of smoke--a steamer was passing--and except for
this hardly visible and motionless streak and the sea-swallows that
flitted over the water, there was nothing to give life to the
monotonous view of sea and sky. To right and left of the summer-house
stretched uneven clay cliffs.

"You know that when a man in a melancholy mood is left _tete-a-tete_
with the sea, or any landscape which seems to him grandiose, there
is always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction
that he will live and die in obscurity, and he reflectively snatches
up a pencil and hastens to write his name on the first thing that
comes handy. And that, I suppose, is why all convenient solitary
nooks like my summer-house are always scrawled over in pencil or
carved with penknives. I remember as though it were to-day; looking
at the parapet I read: 'Ivan Korolkov, May 16, 1876.' Beside Korolkov
some local dreamer had scribbled freely, adding:

"'He stood on the desolate ocean's strand,
While his soul was filled with imaginings grand.'

And his handwriting was dreamy, limp like wet silk. An individual
called Kross, probably an insignificant, little man, felt his
unimportance so deeply that he gave full licence to his penknife
and carved his name in deep letters an inch high. I took a pencil
out of my pocket mechanically, and I too scribbled on one of the
columns. All that is irrelevant, however. . . You must forgive me
--I don't know how to tell a story briefly.

"I was sad and a little bored. Boredom, the stillness, and the
purring of the sea gradually brought me to the line of thought we
have been discussing. At that period, towards the end of the
'seventies, it had begun to be fashionable with the public, and
later, at the beginning of the 'eighties, it gradually passed from
the general public into literature, science, and politics. I was
no more than twenty-six at the time, but I knew perfectly well that
life was aimless and had no meaning, that everything was a deception
and an illusion, that in its essential nature and results a life
of penal servitude in Sahalin was not in any way different from a
life spent in Nice, that the differen