of his childhood he began crossing
himself and thanking someone. Suddenly, with extraordinary clearness,
he thought: 'Here am I, Dmitri Olenin, a being quite distinct from
every other being, now lying all alone Heaven only knows where--where a
stag used to live--an old stag, a beautiful stag who perhaps had never
seen a man, and in a place where no human being has ever sat or thought
these thoughts. Here I sit, and around me stand old and young trees,
one of them festooned with wild grape vines, and pheasants are
fluttering, driving one another about and perhaps scenting their
murdered brothers.' He felt his pheasants, examined them, and wiped the
warm blood off his hand onto his coat. 'Perhaps the jackals scent them
and with dissatisfied faces go off in another direction: above me,
flying in among the leaves which to them seem enormous islands,
mosquitoes hang in the air and buzz: one, two, three, four, a hundred,
a thousand, a million mosquitoes, and all of them buzz something or
other and each one of them is separate from all else and is just such a
separate Dmitri Olenin as I am myself.' He vividly imagined what the
mosquitoes buzzed: 'This way, this way, lads! Here's some one we can
eat!' They buzzed and stuck to him. And it was clear to him that he was
not a Russian nobleman, a member of Moscow society, the friend and
relation of so-and-so and so-and-so, but just such a mosquito, or
pheasant, or deer, as those that were now living all around him. 'Just
as they, just as Daddy Eroshka, I shall live awhile and die, and as he
says truly:

"grass will grow and nothing more".

'But what though the grass does grow?' he continued thinking. 'Still I
must live and be happy, because happiness is all I desire. Never mind
what I am--an animal like all the rest, above whom the grass will grow
and nothing more; or a frame in which a bit of the one God has been
set,--still I must live in the very best way. How then must I live to
be happy, and why was I not happy before?' And he began to recall his
former life and he felt disgusted with himself. He appeared to himself
to have been terribly exacting and selfish, though he now saw that all
the while he really needed nothing for himself. And he looked round at
the foliage with the light shining through it, at the setting sun and
the clear sky, and he felt just as happy as before. 'Why am I happy,
and what used I to live for?' thought he. 'How much I exacted for
myself; how I schem