ams? Here in this very wood we used to have a stream
flowing, and such a stream that the peasants used to set creels in it
and caught pike; wild ducks used to spend the winter by it, and nowadays
there is no water in it worth speaking of, even at the spring
floods. Yes, brother, look where you will, things are bad everywhere.
Everywhere!"

A silence followed. Meliton sank into thought, with his eyes fixed on
one spot. He wanted to think of some one part of nature as yet untouched
by the all-embracing ruin. Spots of light glistened on the mist and the
slanting streaks of rain as though on opaque glass, and immediately died
away again--it was the rising sun trying to break through the clouds and
peep at the earth.

"Yes, the forests, too..." Meliton muttered.

"The forests, too," the shepherd repeated. "They cut them down, and they
catch fire, and they wither away, and no new ones are growing. Whatever
does grow up is cut down at once; one day it shoots up and the next it
has been cut down--and so on without end till nothing's left. I have
kept the herds of the commune ever since the time of Freedom, good man;
before the time of Freedom I was shepherd of the master's herds. I have
watched them in this very spot, and I can't remember a summer day in
all my life that I have not been here. And all the time I have been
observing the works of God. I have looked at them in my time till I know
them, and it is my opinion that all things growing are on the decline.
Whether you take the rye, or the vegetables, or flowers of any sort,
they are all going the same way."

"But people have grown better," observed the bailiff.

"In what way better?"

"Cleverer."

"Cleverer, maybe, that's true, young man; but what's the use of that?
What earthly good is cleverness to people on the brink of ruin? One can
perish without cleverness. What's the good of cleverness to a huntsman
if there is no game? What I think is that God has given men brains and
taken away their strength. People have grown weak, exceedingly weak.
Take me, for instance... I am not worth a halfpenny, I am the humblest
peasant in the whole village, and yet, young man, I have strength. Mind
you, I am in my seventies, and I tend my herd day in and day out, and
keep the night watch, too, for twenty kopecks, and I don't sleep, and
I don't feel the cold; my son is cleverer than I am, but put him in my
place and he would ask for a raise next day, or would be going to the
doc