tood nothing. We stood on the
threshold.

_"Cher"_--he stretched out his arm to the lamp before the ikon--"_cher,_
I have never believed in this, but... so be it, so be it!" He crossed
himself. _"Allons!"_

"Well, that's better so," I thought as I went out on to the steps with
him. "The fresh air will do him good on the way, and we shall calm down,
turn back, and go home to bed...."

But I reckoned without my host. On the way an adventure occurred which
agitated Stepan Trofimovitch even more, and finally determined him to go
on... so that I should never have expected of our friend so much spirit
as he suddenly displayed that morning. Poor friend, kind-hearted friend!

CHAPTER X. FILIBUSTERS. A FATAL MORNING

The adventure that befell us on the way was also a surprising one. But I
must tell the story in due order. An hour before Stepan Trofimovitch
and I came out into the street, a crowd of people, the hands from
Shpigulins' factory, seventy or more in number, had been marching
through the town, and had been an object of curiosity to many
spectators. They walked intentionally in good order and almost in
silence. Afterwards it was asserted that these seventy had been elected
out of the whole number of factory hands, amounting to about nine
hundred, to go to the governor and to try and get from him, in the
absence of their employer, a just settlement of their grievances against
the manager, who, in closing the factory and dismissing the workmen, had
cheated them all in an impudent way--a fact which has since been proved
conclusively. Some people still deny that there was any election of
delegates, maintaining that seventy was too large a number to elect,
and that the crowd simply consisted of those who had been most unfairly
treated, and that they only came to ask for help in their own case, so
that the general "mutiny" of the factory workers, about which there
was such an uproar later on, had never existed at all. Others fiercely
maintained that these seventy men were not simple strikers but
revolutionists, that is, not merely that they were the most turbulent,
but that they must have been worked upon by seditious manifestoes.
The fact is, it is still uncertain whether there had been any outside
influence or incitement at work or not. My private opinion is that the
workmen had not read the seditious manifestoes at all, and if they had
read them, would not have understood one word, for one reason because
the au