“I suffer solely through a cause to which I must answer to Almighty God.  No doubt about it, I am a hopeless and incompetent man; but believe me, on my conscience, I am without a crust of bread and worse off than a dog. . . .  Forgive me, Dmitri Petrovitch.”

Silin was not listening, but sat musing with his head propped on his fists.  The church stood at the end of the street on the high river-bank, and through the trellis gate of the enclosure we could see the river, the water-meadows on the near side of it, and the crimson glare of a camp fire about which black figures of men and horses were moving.  And beyond the fire, further away, there were other lights, where there was a little village.  They were singing there.  On the river, and here and there on the meadows, a mist was rising.  High narrow coils of mist, thick and white as milk, were trailing over the river, hiding the reflection of the stars and hovering over the willows.  Every minute they changed their form, and it seemed as though some were embracing, others were bowing, others lifting up their arms to heaven with wide sleeves like priests, as though they were praying. . . .  Probably they reminded Dmitri Petrovitch of ghosts and of the dead, for he turned facing me and asked with a mournful smile: 

“Tell me, my dear fellow, why is it that when we want to tell some terrible, mysterious, and fantastic story, we draw our material, not from life, but invariably from the world of ghosts and of the shadows beyond the grave.”

“We are frightened of what we don’t understand.”

“And do you understand life?  Tell me:  do you understand life better than the world beyond the grave?”

Dmitri Petrovitch was sitting quite close to me, so that I felt his breath upon my cheek.  In the evening twilight his pale, lean face seemed paler than ever and his dark beard was black as soot.  His eyes were sad, truthful, and a little frightened, as though he were about to tell me something horrible.  He looked into my eyes and went on in his habitual imploring voice: 

“Our life and the life beyond the grave are equally incomprehensible and horrible.  If any one is afraid of ghosts he ought to be afraid, too, of me, and of those lights and of the sky, seeing that, if you come to reflect, all that is no less fantastic and beyond our grasp than apparitions from the other world.  Prince Hamlet did not kill himself because he was afraid of the visions that might haunt his dreams after death.  I like that famous soliloquy of his, but, to be candid, it never touched my soul.  I will confess to you as a friend that in moments of depression I have sometimes pictured to myself the hour of my death.  My fancy invented thousands of the gloomiest visions, and I have succeeded in working myself up to an agonizing exaltation, to a state of nightmare, and I assure you that that did not seem to me more terrible than reality.  What I mean is, apparitions are terrible, but life is terrible,