d labour. Our paths lay apart--but see how near
one another we are. We speak almost the same language, with half a hint
we understand one another, we grew up on the same ideas. There is little
left us now, brother; we are the last of the Mohicans! We might differ
and even quarrel in old days, when so much life still remained before
us; but now, when the ranks are thinned about us, when the younger
generation is coming upon us with other aims than ours, we ought to keep
close to one another! Let us clink glasses, Dmitri, and sing as of old,
_Gaudeamus igitur_!'

The friends clinked their glasses, and sang the old student song in
strained voices, all out of tune, in the true Russian style.

'So you are going now to your country place,' Lezhnyov began again. 'I
don't think you will stay there long, and I cannot imagine where and how
you will end.... But remember, whatever happens to you, you have always
a place, a nest where you can hide yourself. That is my home,--do you
hear, old fellow? Thought, too, has its veterans; they, too, ought to
have their home.'

Rudin got up.

'Thanks, brother,' he said, 'thanks! I will not forget this in you.
Only I do not deserve a home. I have wasted my life, and have not served
thought, as I ought.'

'Hush!' said Lezhnyov. 'Every man remains what Nature has made him,
and one cannot ask more of him! You have called yourself the Wandering
Jew.... But how do you know,--perhaps it was right for you to be ever
wandering, perhaps in that way you are fulfilling a higher calling than
you know; popular wisdom says truly that we are all in God's hands. You
are going, Dmitri,' continued Lezhnyov, seeing that Rudin was taking his
hat 'You will not stop the night?'

'Yes, I am going! Good-bye. Thanks.... I shall come to a bad end.'

'God only knows.... You are resolved to go?'

'Yes, I am going. Good-bye. Do not remember evil against me.'

'Well, do not remember evil against me either,--and don't forget what I
said to you. Good-bye.'...

The friends embraced one another. Rudin went quickly away.

Lezhnyov walked up and down the room a long while, stopped before the
window thinking, and murmured half aloud, 'Poor fellow!' Then sitting
down to the table, he began to write a letter to his wife.

But outside a wind had risen, and was howling with ill-omened moans, and
wrathfully shaking the rattling window-panes. The long autumn night came
on. Well for the man on such a night who sits under