The wave surged back.  A stout smiling monk, playing with his rosary and looking round behind him, squeezed sideways by me, making way for a lady in a hat and velvet cloak.  A monastery servant hurried after the lady, holding a chair over our heads.

I came out of the church.  I wanted to have a look at the dead Nikolay, the unknown canticle writer.  I walked about the monastery wall, where there was a row of cells, peeped into several windows, and, seeing nothing, came back again.  I do not regret now that I did not see Nikolay; God knows, perhaps if I had seen him I should have lost the picture my imagination paints for me now.  I imagine the lovable poetical figure solitary and not understood, who went out at nights to call to Ieronim over the water, and filled his hymns with flowers, stars and sunbeams, as a pale timid man with soft mild melancholy features.  His eyes must have shone, not only with intelligence, but with kindly tenderness and that hardly restrained childlike enthusiasm which I could hear in Ieronim’s voice when he quoted to me passages from the hymns.

When we came out of church after mass it was no longer night.  The morning was beginning.  The stars had gone out and the sky was a morose greyish blue.  The iron slabs, the tombstones and the buds on the trees were covered with dew There was a sharp freshness in the air.  Outside the precincts I did not find the same animated scene as I had beheld in the night.  Horses and men looked exhausted, drowsy, scarcely moved, while nothing was left of the tar barrels but heaps of black ash.  When anyone is exhausted and sleepy he fancies that nature, too, is in the same condition.  It seemed to me that the trees and the young grass were asleep.  It seemed as though even the bells were not pealing so loudly and gaily as at night.  The restlessness was over, and of the excitement nothing was left but a pleasant weariness, a longing for sleep and warmth.

Now I could see both banks of the river; a faint mist hovered over it in shifting masses.  There was a harsh cold breath from the water.  When I jumped on to the ferry, a chaise and some two dozen men and women were standing on it already.  The rope, wet and as I fancied drowsy, stretched far away across the broad river and in places disappeared in the white mist.

“Christ is risen!  Is there no one else?” asked a soft voice.

I recognized the voice of Ieronim.  There was no darkness now to hinder me from seeing the monk.  He was a tall narrow-shouldered man of five-and-thirty, with large rounded features, with half-closed listless-looking eyes and an unkempt wedge-shaped beard.  He had an extraordinarily sad and exhausted look.

“They have not relieved you yet?” I asked in surprise.

“Me?” he answered, turning to me his chilled and dewy face with a smile.  “There is no one to take my place now till morning.  They’ll all be going to the Father Archimandrite’s to break the fast directly.”