gone?" I asked him.

"No, not very long," he replied. He seemed to have grown more cheerful
under the influence of the sunshine. "Yet now it is a good while past my
horse's feeding-time. You see, I am a night cabman."

"Well, I only seemed to myself to be about a minute," I went on. "Do you
know what I went there for?" I added, changing my seat to the well of
the drozhki, so as to be nearer the driver.

"What business is it of mine? I drive a fare where he tells me to go,"
he replied.

"Yes, but, all the same, what do you think I went there for?" I
persisted.

"I expect some one you know is going to be buried there, so you went to
see about a plot for the grave."

"No, no, my friend. Still, DO you know what I went there for?"

"No, of course I cannot tell, barin," he repeated.

His voice seemed to me so kind that I decided to edify him by relating
the cause of my expedition, and even telling him of the feeling which I
had experienced.

"Shall I tell you?" I said. "Well, you see,"--and I told him all, as
well as inflicted upon him a description of my fine sentiments. To this
day I blush at the recollection.

"Well, well!" said the cabman non-committally, and for a long while
afterwards he remained silent and motionless, except that at intervals
he adjusted the skirt of his coat each time that it was jerked from
beneath his leg by the joltings of his huge boot on the drozhki's step.
I felt sure that he must be thinking of me even as the priest had done.
That is to say, that he must be thinking that no such fine-spirited
young man existed in the world as I. Suddenly he shot at me:

"I tell you what, barin. You ought to keep God's affairs to yourself."

"What?" I said.

"Those affairs of yours--they are God's business," he repeated, mumbling
the words with his toothless lips.

"No, he has not understood me," I thought to myself, and said no more to
him till we reached home.

Although it was not my original sense of reconciliation and reverence,
but only a sort of complacency at having experienced such a sense,
that lasted in me during the drive home (and that, too, despite the
distraction of the crowds of people who now thronged the sunlit streets
in every direction), I had no sooner reached home than even my spurious
complacency was shattered, for I found that I had not the forty copecks
wherewith to pay the cabman! To the butler, Gabriel, I already owed
a small debt, and he refused to lend me any more.