irection. I was neither a
grown-up nor a child, while my face was unwashed, my hair unbrushed,
my clothes tumbled, and my boots unblacked and muddy. To what class
of persons were the brethren assigning me--for they stared at me hard
enough? Nevertheless I proceeded in the direction which the young priest
had pointed out to me.

An old man with bushy grey eyebrows and a black cassock met me on the
narrow path to the cells, and asked me what I wanted. For a brief moment
I felt inclined to say "Nothing," and then run back to the drozhki and
drive away home; but, for all its beetling brows, the face of the old
man inspired confidence, and I merely said that I wished to see the
priest (whom I named).

"Very well, young sir; I will take you to him," said the old man as he
turned round. Clearly he had guessed my errand at a stroke. "The father
is at matins at this moment, but he will soon be back," and, opening
a door, the old man led me through a neat hall and corridor, all lined
with clean matting, to a cell.

"Please to wait here," he added, and then, with a kind, reassuring
glance, departed.

The little room in which I found myself was of the smallest possible
dimensions, but extremely neat and clean. Its furniture only consisted
of a small table (covered with a cloth, and placed between two equally
small casement-windows, in which stood two pots of geraniums), a stand
of ikons, with a lamp suspended in front of them, a bench, and two
chairs. In one corner hung a wall clock, with little flowers painted on
its dial, and brass weights to its chains, while upon two nails driven
into a screen (which, fastened to the ceiling with whitewashed pegs,
probably concealed the bed) hung a couple of cassocks. The windows
looked out upon a whitewashed wall, about two arshins distant, and in
the space between them there grew a small lilac-bush.

Not a sound penetrated from without, and in the stillness the measured,
friendly stroke of the clock's pendulum seemed to beat quite loudly.
The instant that I found myself alone in this calm retreat all other
thoughts and recollections left my head as completely as though they had
never been there, and I subsided into an inexpressibly pleasing kind of
torpor. The rusty alpaca cassocks with their frayed linings, the
worn black leather bindings of the books with their metal clasps, the
dull-green plants with their carefully watered leaves and soil, and,
above all, the abrupt, regular beat of