ary for the masses, but they are not fit
for it.' 'Corporal punishment is generally harmful, but in certain cases
it is useful and indispensable.'

"'I know the people and I know how to treat them,' he would say. 'The
people love me. I have only to raise my finger and they will do as I
wish.'

"And all this, mark you, was said with a kindly smile of wisdom. He was
constantly saying: 'We noblemen,' or 'I, as a nobleman.' Apparently he
had forgotten that our grandfather was a peasant and our father a common
soldier. Even our family name, Tchimacha-Himalaysky, which is really an
absurd one, seemed to him full-sounding, distinguished, and very
pleasing.

"But my point does not concern him so much as myself. I want to tell you
what a change took place in me in those few hours while I was in his
house. In the evening, while we were having tea, the cook laid a
plateful of gooseberries on the table. They had not been bought, but
were his own gooseberries, plucked for the first time since the bushes
were planted. Nicholai Ivanich laughed with joy and for a minute or two
he looked in silence at the gooseberries with tears in his eyes. He
could not speak for excitement, then put one into his mouth, glanced at
me in triumph, like a child at last being given its favourite toy, and
said:

"'How good they are!'

"He went on eating greedily, and saying all the while:

"'How good they are! Do try one!'

"It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts
us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one
whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life,
who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with
himself. In my idea of human life there is always some alloy of sadness,
but now at the sight of a happy man I was filled with something like
despair. And at night it grew on me. A bed was made up for me in the
room near my brother's and I could hear him, unable to sleep, going
again and again to the plate of gooseberries. I thought: 'After all,
what a lot of contented, happy people there must be! What an
overwhelming power that means! I look at this life and see the arrogance
and the idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the
weak, the horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, drunkenness,
hypocrisy, falsehood.... Meanwhile in all the houses, all the streets,
there is peace; out of fifty thousand people who live in our town there
is n