him and in me the same feeling, that there is no difference between us. We are the same; in each of us there burns and shines the same trembling spark.

Death sweeps down, with a wave of its chill broad wing….

And the end!

Who then can discern what was the spark that glowed in each of us?

No! We are not beast and man that glance at one another….

They are the eyes of equals, those eyes riveted on one another.

And in each of these, in the beast and in the man, the same life huddles up in fear close to the other.

February 1878.

MY ADVERSARY

I had a comrade who was my adversary; not in pursuits, nor in service, nor in love, but our views were never alike on any subject, and whenever we met, endless argument arose between us.

We argued about everything: about art, and religion, and science, about life on earth and beyond the grave, especially about life beyond the grave.

He was a person of faith and enthusiasm. One day he said to me, ‘You laugh at everything; but if I die before you, I will come to you from the other world…. We shall see whether you will laugh then.’

And he did, in fact, die before me, while he was still young; but the years went by, and I had forgotten his promise, his threat.

One night I was lying in bed, and could not, and, indeed, would not sleep.

In the room it was neither dark nor light. I fell to staring into the grey twilight.

And all at once, I fancied that between the two windows my adversary was standing, and was slowly and mournfully nodding his head up and down.

I was not frightened; I was not even surprised … but raising myself a little, and propping myself on my elbow, I stared still more intently at the unexpected apparition.

The latter continued to nod his head.

‘Well?’ I said at last; ‘are you triumphant or regretful? What is this—warning or reproach?… Or do you mean to give me to understand that you were wrong, that we were both wrong? What are you experiencing? The torments of hell? Or the bliss of paradise? Utter one word at least!’

But my opponent did not utter a single sound, and only, as before, mournfully and submissively nodded his head up and down.

I laughed … he vanished.

February 1878.

THE BEGGAR

I was walking along the street … I was stopped by a decrepit old beggar.

Bloodshot, tearful eyes, blue lips, coarse rags, festering wounds…. Oh, how hideously poverty had eaten into this miserable creature!

He held out to me a red, swollen, filthy hand. He groaned, he mumbled of help.

I began feeling in all my pockets…. No purse, no watch, not even a handkerchief…. I had taken nothing with me. And the beggar was still waiting … and his outstretched hand feebly shook and trembled.

Confused, abashed, I warmly clasped the filthy, shaking hand … ‘Don’t be angry, brother; I have nothing, brother.’

The beggar stared at me with his bloodshot eyes; his blue lips smiled; and he in his turn gripped my chilly fingers.

‘What of it, brother?’ he mumbled; ‘thanks for this, too. That is a gift too, brother.’

I knew that I too had received a gift from my brother.

February 1878.

‘THOU SHALT HEAR THE FOOL’S JUDGMENT….’—PUSHKIN

‘Thou shalt hear the fool’s judgment….’ You always told the truth, O great singer of ours. You spoke it this time, too.

‘The fool’s judgment and the laughter of the crowd’ … who has not known the one and the other?

All that one can, and one ought to bear; and who has the strength, let him despise it!

But there are blows which pierce more cruelly to the very heart…. A man has done all that he could; has worked strenuously, lovingly, honestly…. And honest hearts turn from him in disgust; honest faces burn with indignation at his name. ‘Be gone! Away with you!’ honest young voices scream at him. ‘We have no need of you, nor of your work. You pollute our dwelling-places. You know us not and understand us not…. You are our enemy!’

What is that man to do? Go on working; not try to justify himself, and not even look forward to a fairer judgment.

At one time the tillers of the soil cursed the traveller who brought the potato, the substitute for bread, the poor man’s daily food…. They shook the precious gift out of his outstretched hands, flung it in the mud, trampled it underfoot.

Now they are fed with it, and do not even know their benefactor’s name.

So be it! What is his name to them? He, nameless though he be, saves them from hunger.

Let us try only that what we bring should be really good food.

Bitter, unjust reproach on the lips of those you love…. But that, too, can be borne….

‘Beat me! but listen!’ said the Athenian leader to the Spartan.

‘Beat me! but be healthy and fed!’ we ought to say.

February 1878.

A CONTENTED MAN

A young man goes skipping and bounding along a street in the capital. His movements are gay and alert; there is a sparkle in his eyes, a smirk on his lips, a pleasing flush on his beaming face…. He is all contentment and delight.

What has happened to him? Has he come in for a legacy? Has he been promoted? Is he hastening to meet his beloved? Or is it simply he has had a good breakfast, and the sense of health, the sense of well-fed prosperity, is at work in all his limbs? Surely they have not put on his neck thy lovely, eight-pointed cross, O Polish king, Stanislas?

No. He has hatched a scandal against a friend, has sedulously sown it abroad, has heard it, this same slander, from the lips of another friend, and—has himself believed it!

Oh, how contented! how kind indeed at this minute is this amiable, promising young man!

February 1878.

A RULE OF LIFE

‘If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly, and even to harm him,’ said a crafty old knave to me, ‘you reproach him with the very defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself. Be indignant … and reproach him!

‘To begin with, it will set others thinking you have not that vice.

‘In the second place, your indignation may well be sincere…. You can turn to account the pricks of your own conscience.

If you, for instance, are a turncoat, reproach your opponent with having no convictions!

‘If you are yourself slavish at heart, tell him reproachfully that he is slavish … the slave of civilisation, of Europe, of Socialism!’

‘One might even say, the slave of anti-slavishness,’ I suggested.

‘You might even do that,’ assented the cunning knave.

February 1878.

THE END OF THE WORLD

A DREAM

I fancied I was somewhere in Russia, in the wilds, in a simple country house.

The room big and low pitched with three windows; the walls whitewashed; no furniture. Before the house a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it stretches into the distance; a grey monotonous sky hangs over it, like the canopy of a bed.

I am not alone; there are some ten persons in the room with me. All quite plain people, simply dressed. They walk up and down in silence, as it were stealthily. They avoid one another, and yet are continually looking anxiously at one another.

Not one knows why he has come into this house and what people there are with him. On all the faces uneasiness and despondency … all in turn approach the windows and look about intently as though expecting something from without.

Then again they fall to wandering up and down. Among us is a small-sized boy; from time to time he whimpers in the same thin voice, ‘Father, I’m frightened!’ My heart turns sick at his whimper, and I too begin to be afraid … of what? I don’t know myself. Only I feel, there is coming nearer and nearer a great, great calamity.

The boy keeps on and on with his wail. Oh, to escape from here! How stifling! How weary! how heavy…. But escape is impossible.

That sky is like a shroud. And no wind…. Is the air dead or what?

All at once the boy runs up to the window and shrieks in the same piteous voice, ‘Look! look! the earth has fallen away!’

‘How? fallen away?’ Yes; just now there was a plain before the house, and now it stands on a fearful height! The horizon has sunk, has gone down, and from the very house drops an almost overhanging, as it were scooped-out, black precipice.

We all crowded to the window…. Horror froze our hearts. ‘Here it is … here it is!’ whispers one next me.

And behold, along the whole far boundary of the earth, something began to stir, some sort of small, roundish hillocks began heaving and falling.

‘It is the sea!’ the thought flashed on us all at the same instant. ‘It will swallow us all up directly…. Only how can it grow and rise upwards? To this precipice?’

And yet, it grows, grows enormously…. Already there are not separate hillocks heaving in the distance…. One continuous, monstrous wave embraces the whole circle of the horizon.

It is swooping, swooping, down upon us! In an icy hurricane it flies, swirling in the darkness of hell. Everything shuddered—and there, in this flying mass—was the crash of thunder, the iron wail of thousands of throats….

Ah! what a roaring and moaning! It was the earth howling for terror….

The end of it! the end of all!

The child whimpered once more…. I tried to clutch at my companions, but already we were all crushed, buried, drowned, swept away by that pitch-black, icy, thundering wave! Darkness … darkness everlasting!

Scarcely breathing, I awoke.

March 1878.

MASHA

When I lived, many years ago, in