ried. I asked if he never inquired about me. That was a
hard question to answer. All he had ever been heard to say of me was
that I should one day come home a beggar. But the cruelest thing of all
was my countrymen's calling me the goatherd. My brother was to blame
for my having to bear that nickname through life. I always meant to
send him a couple of thousand florins, with a letter saying: 'The
goatherd sends you this for the hundred cuffs you owe him, for all the
good you have done him, and for your faithful care of him.' I kept
thinking I would do it, but, the devil knows why, I never did, I got
tired living in Moscow, and wanted to go home; instead of which I went
to Tiflis, and stayed there eleven years.

"As I began to grow old my feelings changed, I resolved to go home with
a bag of gold, that all men should see but my brother; with him I would
have nothing to do. The more I thought of it, the more I was convinced
that he had dealt cruelly with me, and would be glad to know I was
dead. He should suffer for it. I hated him and often reviled him in my
thoughts; yet my thoughts kept returning to him. An indescribable
homesickness consumed me. No water tasted as good as that of the old
well at home by the church, and no air was as fragrant as ours of a
summer evening. Thousands and thousands of times I have thought how
gladly I would give a hundred florins for a roomful of the air of my
native valley. Then I imagined the delight of getting home and having
all the dwellers above the town and below it gathering together to see
Peter, or Petrovitsch, as they call me now. There should be long tables
spread on the meadow before our house, where all should come who would,
and eat and drink for three days,--all but my brother. Yet all the time
I felt in my heart, though I would not confess it, that he was the only
person I loved. Every year I said, next year I shall go; but I kept
staying on. It is hard to leave a business in which everything you
touch turns to gold. I wondered how I came to be so gray and old. At
last I fell sick,--for the first time in my life dangerously sick. For
weeks I was out of my head, and talked, as I afterwards learned, in a
language that no one about me understood. The doctor was able to make
out a few words, which he said were German. I frequently cried out,
'Cain!' and, 'What is the price of the boy?' Then I remembered
Caballero in the village near Valencia. Suppose you should one day be
lyin