ted persons, it is impossible to extirpate it!

I have never again had that dream which had been wont so to disturb me;
I no longer "search for" my father; but it has sometimes seemed to
me--and it seems so to me to this day--that in my sleep I hear distant
shrieks, unintermittent, melancholy plaints; they resound somewhere
behind a lofty wall, across which it is impossible to clamber; they
rend my heart--and I am utterly unable to comprehend what it is: whether
it is a living man groaning, or whether I hear the wild, prolonged roar
of the troubled sea. And now it passes once more into that beast-like
growl--and I awake with sadness and terror in my soul.

FATHER ALEXYEI'S STORY

(1877)

Twenty years ago I was obliged--in my capacity of private inspector--to
make the circuit of all my aunt's rather numerous estates. The parish
priests, with whom I regarded it as my duty to make acquaintance, proved
to be individuals of pretty much one pattern, and made after one model,
as it were. At length, in about the last of the estates which I was
inspecting, I hit upon a priest who did not resemble his brethren. He
was a very aged man, almost decrepit; and had it not been for the urgent
entreaties of his parishioners, who loved and respected him, he would
long before have petitioned to be retired that he might rest. Two
peculiarities impressed me in Father Alexyei (that was the priest's
name). In the first place, he not only asked nothing for himself but
announced plainly that he required nothing; and, in the second place, I
have never beheld in any human face a more sorrowful, thoroughly
indifferent--what is called an "overwhelmed"--expression. The features
of that face were of the ordinary rustic type: a wrinkled forehead,
small grey eyes, a large nose, a wedge-shaped beard, a swarthy,
sunburned skin.... But the expression! ... the expression!... In that
dim gaze life barely burned, and sadly at that; and his voice also was,
somehow, lifeless and dim.

I fell ill and kept my bed for several days. Father Alexyei dropped in
to see me in the evenings, not to chat, but to play "fool."[16] The game
of cards seemed to divert him more than it did me. One day, after having
been left "the fool" several times in succession (which delighted Father
Alexyei not a little), I turned the conversation on his past life, on
the afflictions which had left on him such manifest traces. Father
Alexyei remained obdurate for a long