water-butt the fat kindly-looking man goes rolling out of
the yard.

"What else was to be expected?" grumbles Konev with his eyebrows
elevated to the middle of his forehead. "The folk hereabouts are
knaves. Ah, well!"

As for the women, they withdraw to the darkest corner of the hut, and
lie down, while the young fellow disappears after probing the walls and
floor, and returns with an armful of straw which he strews upon the
hard, beaten clay. Then he stretches himself thereon with hands clasped
behind his battered head.

"See the resourcefulness of that fellow from Penza!" comments Konev
enviously. "Hi, you women! There is, it would seem, some straw about."

To this comes from the women's corner the acid reply:

"Then go and fetch some."

"For you?"

"Yes, for us."

"Then I must, I suppose."

Nevertheless Konev merely remains sitting on the windowsill, and
discoursing on the subject of certain needy folk who do but desire to
go and say their prayers in church, yet are banded into barns.

"Yes, and though you may say that folk, the world over, have a soul in
common, I tell you that this is not so--that, on the contrary, we
Russian strangers find it a hard matter here to get looked upon as
respectable."

With which he slips out quietly into the street, and disappears from
view.

The young fellow's sleep is restless--he keeps tossing about, with his
fat arms and legs sprawling over the floor, and grunting, and snoring.
Under him the straw makes a crackling sound, while the two women
whisper together in the darkness, and the reeds of the dry thatch on
the roof rustle (the wind is still drawing an occasional breath), and
ever and anon a twig brushes against an outside wall. The scene is like
a scene in a dream.

Out of doors the myriad tongues of the pitch-black, starless night seem
to be debating something in soft, sad, pitiful tones which ever keep
growing fainter; until, when the hour of ten has been struck on the
watchman's gong, and the metal ceases to vibrate, the world grows
quieter still, much as though all living things, alarmed by the clang
in the night, have concealed themselves in the invisible earth or the
equally invisible heavens.

I seat myself by the window, and watch how the earth keeps exhaling
darkness, and the darkness enveloping, drowning the grey, blurred huts
in black, tepid vapour, though the church remains invisible--evidently
something stands interposed between it and my viewpo