a
sort of unsatisfied, yet tumultuous, joy would fill my eyes.

Always, too, I was alone; yet always, too, it seemed to me that,
although great, mysterious Nature could draw the shining disc of the
moon to herself, and somehow hold in some high, indefinite place the
pale-blue sky, and be everywhere around me, and fill of herself the
infinity of space, while I was but a lowly worm, already defiled with
the poor, petty passions of humanity--always it seemed to me that,
nevertheless, both Nature and the moon and I were one.

XXXIII. OUR NEIGHBOURS

ON the first day after our arrival, I had been greatly astonished that
Papa should speak of our neighbours, the Epifanovs, as "nice people,"
and still more so that he should go to call upon them. The fact was that
we had long been at law over some land with this family. When a child,
I had more than once heard Papa raging over the litigation, abusing
the Epifanovs, and warning people (so I understood him) against them.
Likewise, I had heard Jakoff speak of them as "our enemies" and "black
people" and could remember Mamma requesting that their names should
never be mentioned in her presence, nor, indeed, in the house at all.

From these data I, as a child, had arrived at the clear and assured
conviction that the Epifanovs were foemen of ours who would at any time
stab or strangle both Papa and his sons if they should ever come across
them, as well as that they were "black people", in the literal sense of
the term. Consequently, when, in the year that Mamma died, I chanced to
catch sight of Avdotia ("La Belle Flamande") on the occasion of a visit
which she paid to my mother, I found it hard to believe that she did
not come of a family of negroes. All the same, I had the lowest possible
opinion of the family, and, for all that we saw much of them that
summer, continued to be strongly prejudiced against them. As a matter
of fact, their household only consisted of the mother (a widow of fifty,
but a very well-preserved, cheery old woman), a beautiful daughter named
Avdotia, and a son, Peter, who was a stammerer, unmarried, and of very
serious disposition.

For the last twenty years before her husband's death, Madame Epifanov
had lived apart from him--sometimes in St. Petersburg, where she had
relatives, but more frequently at her village of Mitishtchi, which
stood some three versts from ours. Yet the neighbourhood had taken
to circulating such horrible tales concerning he