tent murmur of
human voices.

Similarly the buff-coloured bales in the steamer's stem gradually
reddened, as did the grey tints in the beard of the large peasant
where, sprawling his ponderous form over the deck, he was lying asleep
with mouth open, nostrils distended with stertorous snores, brows
raised as though in astonishment, and thick moustache intermittently
twitching.

Someone amid the piles of bales was panting as he fidgeted, and as I
glanced in that direction I encountered the gaze of a pair of small,
narrow, inflamed eyes, and beheld before me the ragged, mitten-like
face, though now it looked even thinner and greyer than it had done on
the previous evening. Apparently its owner was feeling cold, for he had
hunched his chin between his knees, and clasped his hirsute arms around
his legs, as his eyes stared gloomily, with a hunted air, in my
direction. Then wearily, lifelessly he said:

"Yes, you have found me. And now you can thrash me if you wish to do
so--you can give me a blow, for I gave you one, and, consequently, it's
your turn to do the hitting."

Stupefied with astonishment, I inquired in an undertone.

"It was you, then, that hit me?"

"It was so, but where are your witnesses?"

The words came in hoarse, croaked, suppressed accents, with a
separation of the hands, and an upthrow of the head and projecting cars
which had such a comical look of being crushed beneath the weight of
the battened-down cap. Next, thrusting his hands into the pockets of
his pea-jacket, the man repeated in a tone of challenge:

"Where, I say, are your witnesses? You can go to the devil!"

I could discern in him something at once helpless and froglike which
evoked in me a strong feeling of repulsion; and since, with that, I had
no real wish to converse with him, or even to revenge myself upon him
for his cowardly blow, I turned away in silence.

But a moment later I looked at him again, and saw that he was seated in
his former posture, with his arms embracing his knees, his chin resting
upon them, and his red, sleepless eyes gazing lifelessly at the barge
which the steamer was towing between wide ribbons of foaming
water--ribbons sparkling in the sunlight like mash in a brewer's vat.

And those eyes, that dead, alienated expression, the gay cheerfulness
of the morning, and the clear radiance of the heavens, and the kindly
tints of the two banks, and the vocal sounds of the June day, and the
bracing freshness of