nt where it shrank to a narrow hole. The old man and the child
crawled through it with difficulty. Soon, fortunately, they could stand
upright. A few steps more and the old man abruptly fell on his knees.

The place where Ivan's mother had been working no longer existed. The
child and the old man were confronted by a huge mass of damp earth. Its
dampness was constantly increasing, for it was traversed by a thread of
water from a spring which had suddenly been liberated, one knew not how,
from its long imprisonment. From underneath this damp mass projected the
feet of Ivan's mother. The child rushed forward, seized the coarse boots
which she wore and tugged at them, but in vain; the earth which lay on
his mother guarded its prey well.

"Maria! Maria!" cried the old miner in a despairing voice.

There was no reply. The feet in their coarse boots, feebly lighted by
the little lamp, remained motionless.

When Ivan grew up and became a miner in his turn his surroundings
changed their aspect in his eyes and became inanimate. The springs and
the metals, these bondslaves of the earth, no longer possessed a soul
for him. The dark rocks, when his pickaxe laid their sides open, were as
inanimate as the damp masses of ore. Jesus also, Whom he saw so clearly
in his childhood, had disappeared from the time that they had abandoned
the old mine for another one. But the impressions made on him in
childhood remained hidden and shut up in the profoundest depth of Ivan's
heart, resembling in this the hidden springs in the heart of the rock.
Later on, under the inexorable pressure of time when Ivan had become
old, these impressions rose again to the surface, and he found himself
once more surrounded by vague apparitions and mysterious murmurs. Only
Jesus remained absent, though the fixed gaze of the old Ivan searched
for Him perseveringly in the darkness of the subterranean kingdom.

II

"Well, old man, get in!" said the miners. The moving windlass brought to
the mouth of the shaft the bucket in which the ore was brought up. The
rusty iron chain unrolled slowly with a harsh grating sound. Below the
darkness was so dense that one could not even perceive the reflection of
water which is always visible at the bottom of the deepest wells. Ivan
squatted down in the bucket.

"Now, in the name of God! you will turn round a bit, old man."

"It won't hurt him to swing a little," said others jokingly.

"Look, you fellows, we will get him d