journey when he made his desperate fight for life and
happiness.

XXVII

The snow rarely falls in Krasnoiarsk. It is a little oasis in the
great winter desert of Siberia. Rezanov, his face turned to the
window, could see the red banks on the opposite side of the river. The
sun transformed the gilded cupolas and crosses into dazzling points of
light, and the sky above the spires and towers, the stately square and
narrow dirty streets of the bustling little capital, was as blue and
unflecked as that which arched so high above a land where Castilian
roses grew, and one woman among a gay and thoughtless people dreamed,
with all the passion of her splendid youth, of the man to whom she had
pledged an eternal troth. Rezanov's mind was clear in those last
moments, but something of the serenity and the selfishness of death had
already descended upon him. He heard with indifference the sobs of
Jon, crouched at the foot of his bed. Tears and regrets were a part of
the general futility of life, insignificant enough at the grand
threshold of death.

No doubt that his great schemes would die with him, and were he
remembered at all it would be as a dreamer; or as a failure because he
had died before accomplishing what his brain and energy and enthusiasm
alone could force to fruition. None realized better than he the
paucity of initiative and executive among the characteristics of the
Slav. What mattered it? He had had glimpses more than once of the
apparently illogical sequence of life, the vanity of human effort, the
wanton cruelty of Nature. He had known men struck down before in the
maturity of their usefulness, cities destroyed by earthquake or
hurricane in the fairest and most promising of their days: public men,
priests, parents, children, wantons, criminals, blotted out with equal
impartiality by a brutal force that would seem to have but a casual use
for the life she flung broadcast on her planets. Man was the helpless
victim of Nature, a calf in a tiger's paws. If she overlooked him, or
swept him contemptuously into the class of her favorites, well and
good; otherwise he was her sport, the plaything of her idler moments.
Those that cried "But why?" "What reason?" "What use?" were those
that had never looked over the walls of their ego at the great dramatic
moments in the career of Nature, when she made immortal fame for
herself at the expense of millions of pigmies.

And if his energies, his talents, his