“But people have grown better,” observed the bailiff.

“In what way better?”

“Cleverer.”

“Cleverer, maybe, that’s true, young man; but what’s the use of that?  What earthly good is cleverness to people on the brink of ruin?  One can perish without cleverness.  What’s the good of cleverness to a huntsman if there is no game?  What I think is that God has given men brains and taken away their strength.  People have grown weak, exceedingly weak.  Take me, for instance...  I am not worth a halfpenny, I am the humblest peasant in the whole village, and yet, young man, I have strength.  Mind you, I am in my seventies, and I tend my herd day in and day out, and keep the night watch, too, for twenty kopecks, and I don’t sleep, and I don’t feel the cold; my son is cleverer than I am, but put him in my place and he would ask for a raise next day, or would be going to the doctors.  There it is.  I eat nothing but bread, for ’Give us this day our daily bread,’ and my father ate nothing but bread, and my grandfather; but the peasant nowadays must have tea and vodka and white loaves, and must sleep from sunset to dawn, and he goes to the doctor and pampers himself in all sorts of ways.  And why is it?  He has grown weak; he has not the strength to endure.  If he wants to stay awake, his eyes close—­there is no doing anything.”

“That’s true,” Meliton agreed; “the peasant is good for nothing nowadays.”

“It’s no good hiding what is wrong; we get worse from year to year.  And if you take the gentry into consideration, they’ve grown feebler even more than the peasants have.  The gentleman nowadays has mastered everything; he knows what he ought not to know, and what is the sense of it?  It makes you feel pitiful to look at him....  He is a thin, puny little fellow, like some Hungarian or Frenchman; there is no dignity nor air about him; it’s only in name he is a gentleman.  There is no place for him, poor dear, and nothing for him to do, and there is no making out what he wants.  Either he sits with a hook catching fish, or he lolls on his back reading, or trots about among the peasants saying all sorts of things to them, and those that are hungry go in for being clerks.  So he spends his life in vain.  And he has no notion of doing something real and useful.  The gentry in old days were half of them generals, but nowadays they are—­a poor lot.”

“They are badly off nowadays,” said Meliton.

“They are poorer because God has taken away their strength.  You can’t go against God.”

Meliton stared at a fixed point again.  After thinking a little he heaved a sigh as staid, reasonable people do sigh, shook his head, and said: 

“And all because of what?  We have sinned greatly, we have forgotten God.. and it seems that the time has come for all to end.  And, after all, the world can’t last for ever—­it’s time to know when to take leave.”

The shepherd sighed and, as though wishing to cut short an unpleasant conversation, he walked away from the birch-tree and began silently reckoning over the cows.