was horrible!  I, too, would shiver all over like a Jew in a frying-pan, I don’t know myself why, and our legs began to prance about.  It’s a strange thing, indeed:  you don’t want to, but you prance about and waggle your arms; and after that, screaming and shrieking, we all danced and ran after one another —­ran till we dropped; and in that way, in wild frenzy, I fell into fornication.”

The policeman laughed, but, noticing that no one else was laughing, became serious and said: 

“That’s Molokanism.  I have heard they are all like that in the Caucasus.”

“But I was not killed by a thunderbolt,” Matvey went on, crossing himself before the ikon and moving his lips.  “My dead mother must have been praying for me in the other world.  When everyone in the town looked upon me as a saint, and even the ladies and gentlemen of good family used to come to me in secret for consolation, I happened to go into our landlord, Osip Varlamitch, to ask forgiveness —­it was the Day of Forgiveness—­and he fastened the door with the hook, and we were left alone face to face.  And he began to reprove me, and I must tell you Osip Varlamitch was a man of brains, though without education, and everyone respected and feared him, for he was a man of stern, God-fearing life and worked hard.  He had been the mayor of the town, and a warden of the church for twenty years maybe, and had done a great deal of good; he had covered all the New Moscow Road with gravel, had painted the church, and had decorated the columns to look like malachite.  Well, he fastened the door, and—­’I have been wanting to get at you for a long time, you rascal, . . .’ he said.  ‘You think you are a saint,’ he said.  ’No you are not a saint, but a backslider from God, a heretic and an evildoer! . . .’  And he went on and on. . . .  I can’t tell you how he said it, so eloquently and cleverly, as though it were all written down, and so touchingly.  He talked for two hours.  His words penetrated my soul; my eyes were opened.  I listened, listened and —­burst into sobs!  ‘Be an ordinary man,’ he said, ’eat and drink, dress and pray like everyone else.  All that is above the ordinary is of the devil.  Your chains,’ he said, ’are of the devil; your fasting is of the devil; your prayer-room is of the devil.  It is all pride,’ he said.  Next day, on Monday in Holy Week, it pleased God I should fall ill.  I ruptured myself and was taken to the hospital.  I was terribly worried, and wept bitterly and trembled.  I thought there was a straight road before me from the hospital to hell, and I almost died.  I was in misery on a bed of sickness for six months, and when I was discharged the first thing I did I confessed, and took the sacrament in the regular way and became a man again.  Osip Varlamitch saw me off home and exhorted me:  ’Remember, Matvey, that anything above the ordinary is of the devil.’  And now I eat and drink like everyone else and pray like everyone else . . . .  If it