the motions of our hands.  And we had grown so tired of looking at one another that each of us knew all the wrinkles on the faces of the others.  We had nothing to talk about, we were used to this and were silent all the time, unless abusing one another—­for there is always something for which to abuse a man, especially a companion.  But we even abused one another very seldom.  Of what can a man be guilty when he is half dead, when he is like a statue, when all his feelings are crushed under the weight of toil?  But silence is terrible and painful only to those who have said all and have nothing more to speak of; but to those who never had anything to say—­to them silence is simple and easy. . . .  Sometimes we sang, and our song began thus:  During work some one would suddenly heave a sigh, like that of a tired horse, and would softly start one of those drawling songs, whose touchingly caressing tune always gives ease to the troubled soul of the singer.  One of us sang, and at first we listened in silence to his lonely song, which was drowned and deafened underneath the heavy ceiling of the cellar, like the small fire of a wood-pile in the steppe on a damp autumn night, when the gray sky is hanging over the earth like a leaden roof.  Then another joined the singer, and now, two voices soar softly and mournfully over the suffocating heat of our narrow ditch.  And suddenly a few more voices take up the song—­and the song bubbles up like a wave, growing stronger, louder, as though moving asunder the damp, heavy walls of our stony prison.

All the twenty-six sing; loud voices, singing in unison, fill the workshop; the song has no room there; it strikes against the stones of the walls, it moans and weeps and reanimates the heart by a soft tickling pain, irritating old wounds and rousing sorrow.

The singers breathe deeply and heavily; some one unexpectedly leaves off his song and listens for a long time to the singing of his companions, and again his voice joins the general wave.  Another mournfully exclaims, Eh! sings, his eyes closed, and it may be that the wide, heavy wave of sound appears to him like a road leading somewhere far away, like a wide road, lighted by the brilliant sun, and he sees himself walking there. . . .

The flame is constantly trembling in the oven, the baker’s shovel is scraping against the brick, the water in the kettle is purring, and the reflection of the fire is trembling on the wall, laughing in silence. . . .  And we sing away, with some one else’s words, our dull sorrow, the heavy grief of living men, robbed of sunshine, the grief of slaves.  Thus we lived, twenty-six of us, in the cellar of a big stony house, and it was hard for us to live as though all the three stories of the house had been built upon our shoulders.

But besides the songs, we had one other good thing, something we all loved and which, perhaps, came to us instead of the sun.  The second story of our house was occupied by an embroidery shop, and there, among many girl workers, lived the sixteen year old chamber-maid, Tanya.  Every morning her little, pink face, with blue, cheerful eyes, leaned against the pane of the little window in our hallway door, and her ringing, kind voice cried to us:  “Little prisoners!  Give me biscuits!”