am I to do, what am I to
do?"

"There, there!" the passengers try to console him. "It's all right
. . . . You must telegraph to your wife and try to change into the
Petersburg express. In that way you'll overtake her."

"The Petersburg express!" weeps the bridegroom, the creator of his
own happiness. "And how am I to get a ticket for the Petersburg
express? All my money is with my wife."

The passengers, laughing and whispering together, make a collection
and furnish the happy man with funds.

A TROUBLESOME VISITOR

IN the low-pitched, crooked little hut of Artyom, the forester, two
men were sitting under the big dark ikon--Artyom himself, a short
and lean peasant with a wrinkled, aged-looking face and a little
beard that grew out of his neck, and a well-grown young man in a
new crimson shirt and big wading boots, who had been out hunting
and come in for the night. They were sitting on a bench at a little
three-legged table on which a tallow candle stuck into a bottle was
lazily burning.

Outside the window the darkness of the night was full of the noisy
uproar into which nature usually breaks out before a thunderstorm.
The wind howled angrily and the bowed trees moaned miserably. One
pane of the window had been pasted up with paper, and leaves torn
off by the wind could be heard pattering against the paper.

"I tell you what, good Christian," said Artyom in a hoarse little
tenor half-whisper, staring with unblinking, scared-looking eyes
at the hunter. "I am not afraid of wolves or bears, or wild beasts
of any sort, but I am afraid of man. You can save yourself from
beasts with a gun or some other weapon, but you have no means of
saving yourself from a wicked man."

"To be sure, you can fire at a beast, but if you shoot at a robber
you will have to answer for it: you will go to Siberia."

"I've been forester, my lad, for thirty years, and I couldn't tell
you what I have had to put up with from wicked men. There have been
lots and lots of them here. The hut's on a track, it's a cart-road,
and that brings them, the devils. Every sort of ruffian turns up,
and without taking off his cap or making the sign of the cross,
bursts straight in upon one with: 'Give us some bread, you old
so-and-so.' And where am I to get bread for him? What claim has he?
Am I a millionaire to feed every drunkard that passes? They are
half-blind with spite. . . . They have no cross on them, the devils
. . . . They'll give you a clou