idea that some day one of them would be able to
raise me to a higher level, and to bring me to an understanding of this
unintelligible and complicated existence of ours. Hence I kept asking
myself the restless, the importunate question:

"What precisely is the human soul?"

Certain souls, I thought, existed which seemed like balls of copper,
for, solid and immovable, they reflected things from their own point of
view alone, in a dull and irregular and distorted fashion. And souls, I
thought, existed which seemed as flat as mirrors, and, for all intents
and purposes, had no existence at all.

And in every case the human soul seemed formless, like a cloud, and as
murkily mutable as an imitation opal, a thing which altered according
to the colour of what adjoined it.

Only as regarded the soul of the intelligent Ossip was I absolutely at
a loss, absolutely unable to reach a conclusion.

Pondering these and similar matters in my mind, I, on the day of which
I speak, stood gazing at the river, and at the town under the hill, as
I listened to the bells. Rearing themselves aloft like the organ pipes
in my favourite Polish-Roman Catholic church, the steeples of the town
had their crosses dimly sparkling as though the latter had been stars
imprisoned in a murky sky. Yet it was as though those stars hoped
eventually to ascend into the purer firmament above the wind-torn
clouds that they sparkled; and as I stood watching the clouds glide
onward, and momentarily efface with their shadows, the town's
multifarious hues, I marked the fact that although, whenever dark-blue
cavities in their substance permitted the beams of the sun to
illuminate the buildings below, those buildings' roofs assumed tints of
increased cheerfulness. The clouds seemed to glide the faster to veil
the beams, while the humid shadows grew more opaque--and the scene
darkened as though only for a moment had it assumed a semblance of joy.

The buildings of the town (looking like heaps of muddy snow), the
black, naked earth around those buildings, the trees in the gardens,
the hummocks of piled-up soil, the dull grey glimmer of the window
panes of the houses--all these things reminded me of winter, even
though the misty breath of the northern spring was beginning to steal
over the whole.

Presently a young fellow with flaxen hair, a pendent underlip, and a
tall, ungainly figure, by name Mishuk Diatlov, essayed to troll the
stanza:

"That morn to him the