e a
burial-ground, he seems to like it, which is, however, quite natural.
Such a full life as he leads is so overflowing with absorbing interests
that he has little need of assistance from his surroundings.

"The visit to Rogojin exhausted me terribly. Besides, I had felt ill
since the morning; and by evening I was so weak that I took to my bed,
and was in high fever at intervals, and even delirious. Colia sat with
me until eleven o'clock.

"Yet I remember all he talked about, and every word we said, though
whenever my eyes closed for a moment I could picture nothing but the
image of Surikoff just in the act of finding a million roubles. He could
not make up his mind what to do with the money, and tore his hair over
it. He trembled with fear that somebody would rob him, and at last
he decided to bury it in the ground. I persuaded him that, instead of
putting it all away uselessly underground, he had better melt it down
and make a golden coffin out of it for his starved child, and then dig
up the little one and put her into the golden coffin. Surikoff accepted
this suggestion, I thought, with tears of gratitude, and immediately
commenced to carry out my design.

"I thought I spat on the ground and left him in disgust. Colia told
me, when I quite recovered my senses, that I had not been asleep for a
moment, but that I had spoken to him about Surikoff the whole while.

"At moments I was in a state of dreadful weakness and misery, so that
Colia was greatly disturbed when he left me.

"When I arose to lock the door after him, I suddenly called to mind a
picture I had noticed at Rogojin's in one of his gloomiest rooms, over
the door. He had pointed it out to me himself as we walked past it, and
I believe I must have stood a good five minutes in front of it. There
was nothing artistic about it, but the picture made me feel strangely
uncomfortable. It represented Christ just taken down from the cross. It
seems to me that painters as a rule represent the Saviour, both on the
cross and taken down from it, with great beauty still upon His face.
This marvellous beauty they strive to preserve even in His moments of
deepest agony and passion. But there was no such beauty in Rogojin's
picture. This was the presentment of a poor mangled body which had
evidently suffered unbearable anguish even before its crucifixion, full
of wounds and bruises, marks of the violence of soldiers and people, and
of the bitterness of the moment when