“So he grew old.

“‘You are old, grandfather; you will never reach Jerusalem,’ the peasant women told him.  But he always smiled and said, ’As God wills.  Perhaps if I die I shall see it sooner.’

“And he died, poor, wretched, uncared for, in the streets of a little village near Odessa, and children came and beat off the hungry dogs from his body with sticks.

“‘What is this?’ said one policeman to another.

“‘A Bogo-moletz (God-prayer) dead, that’s all,’ was the reply.

“‘No money?’

“‘None.  If he had any his pockets have been picked.’

“By his passport he belonged to Petchora province, far away.  No one knew him.  No one claimed him.

“‘It means he must be buried at the public expense,’ said the head man of the village, and spat upon the ground.

“In the whole village only the coffin maker rejoiced, and he had small cause, since a pauper’s coffin costs but a shilling.

“‘He must be buried on the common,’ said the head man.  ’There’s no room in the churchyard.’

“‘But a pilgrim,’ said an objector.  ’You must bury him in consecrated ground; you can’t shut him out of the Heavenly Kingdom.’

“’No matter.  Ask the priest.  If the dead man can pay for a plot of ground for a grave, well and good; or if the villagers will subscribe....’

“The head man looked at the little crowd assembled.  They were a poor and needy crowd.  No one answered him.  Then, without doing any more, the head man walked away, and the dead body remained in the street.

“It seemed no one would pay for the grave, but in the afternoon a woman who lived on the outskirts came and claimed the pilgrim as a distant relative.  He could scarcely have been a relative, except inasmuch as we are all descended from Adam.

“The head man and the village priest rejoiced, and the woman took the dead body home and washed it, and clothed it in white linen, and she ordered a three-rouble coffin covered with purple cloth.

“But she was a very poor woman, and when she had paid for the grave she had no money to pay for singers and for prayers.

“‘God will have mercy,’ she said.  ’And belike he was a good man, a pilgrim.’

“And that woman was a virgin,” added Jeremy abruptly and, as I thought, irrelevantly.  But the chambers of that old man’s mind were strangely furnished.

“She was a virgin.  What remains to be said?  She hired a man to dig a grave, and another to wheel the barrow with the coffin.  She had no friends who would follow the coffin with her, but in the main street she found a cripple whom she had once befriended, and two little boys who liked to sing the funeral chant.

“Thus the old pilgrim was taken to the grave, and in his honour a simple woman, two street children, and a cripple followed his corse.”

* * * * *

There was a long pause.