ked at his pipe until his nose
made a glowing red blur in the darkness. Then he muttered slowly:

"How life ought to be lived no one could say exactly. And this though I
have given much thought to the subject, and still am doing so."

I found it no difficult matter to form a mental picture of the desolate
existence which this man must be leading--this man whom all his fellows
both derided and shunned. For at that time I too was bidding fair to
fail in life, and had my heart in the grip of ceaseless despondency.

The truth is that of futile people Russia is over-full. Many such I
myself have known, and always they have attracted me as strongly and
mysteriously as a magnet. Always they have struck me more favourably
than the provincial-minded majority who live for food and work alone,
and put away from them all that could conceivably render their
bread-winning difficult, or prevent them from snatching bread out of
the hands of their weaker neighbours. For most such folk are gloomy and
self-contained, with hearts that have turned to wood, and an outlook
that ever reverts to the past; unless, indeed, they be folk of spurious
good nature, an addition to talkativeness, and an apparent bonhomie
which veils a frigid, grey interior, and conveys an impression of
cruelty and greed of all that life contains.

Always, in the end, I have detected in such folk something wintry,
something that makes them seem, as it were, to be spending spring and
summer in expectation solely of the winter season, with its long
nights, and its cold of an austerity which forces one for ever to be
consuming food.

Yet seldom among this distasteful and wearisome crowd of wintry folk is
there to be encountered a man who has altogether proved a failure. But
if he has done so, he will be found to be a man whose nature is of a
more thoughtful, a more truly existent, a more clear-sighted cast than
that of his fellows--a man who at least can look beyond the boundaries
of the trite and commonplace, and whose mentality has a greater
capacity for attaining spiritual fulfilment, and is more desirous of
doing so, than the mentality of his compeers. That is to say, in such a
man one can always detect a striving for space, as a man who, loving
light, carries light in himself.

Unfortunately, all too often is that light only the fugitive
phosphorescence of putrefaction; wherefore as one contemplates him one
soon begins to realise with bitterness and vexation and