endured! Yet what I have done has not been done with the intention of
robbing any one, nor of cheating the Treasury. Why, then, did I gather
those kopecks? I gathered them to the end that one day I might be able
to live in plenty, and also to have something to leave to the wife
and children whom, for the benefit and welfare of my country, I hoped
eventually to win and maintain. That was why I gathered those kopecks.
True, I worked by devious methods--that I fully admit; but what else
could I do? And even devious methods I employed only when I saw that the
straight road would not serve my purpose so well as a crooked. Moreover,
as I toiled, the appetite for those methods grew upon me. Yet what
I took I took only from the rich; whereas villains exist who, while
drawing thousands a year from the Treasury, despoil the poor, and take
from the man with nothing even that which he has. Is it not the cruelty
of fate, therefore, that, just when I was beginning to reap the harvest
of my toil--to touch it, so to speak, with the tip of one finger--there
should have arisen a sudden storm which has sent my barque to pieces on
a rock? My capital had nearly reached the sum of three hundred thousand
roubles, and a three-storied house was as good as mine, and twice over
I could have bought a country estate. Why, then, should such a tempest
have burst upon me? Why should I have sustained such a blow? Was not my
life already like a barque tossed to and fro by the billows? Where
is Heaven's justice--where is the reward for all my patience, for my
boundless perseverance? Three times did I have to begin life afresh, and
each time that I lost my all I began with a single kopeck at a moment
when other men would have given themselves up to despair and drink. How
much did I not have to overcome. How much did I not have to bear! Every
kopeck which I gained I had to make with my whole strength; for though,
to others, wealth may come easily, every coin of mine had to be 'forged
with a nail worth three kopecks' as the proverb has it. With such a
nail--with the nail of an iron, unwearying perseverance--did _I_ forge
my kopecks."

Convulsively sobbing with a grief which he could not repress, Chichikov
sank upon a chair, tore from his shoulders the last ragged, trailing
remnants of his frockcoat, and hurled them from him. Then, thrusting his
fingers into the hair which he had once been so careful to preserve, he
pulled it out by handfuls at a time, as th