The valley of the Yellow River opened before him.  The stream was broader and fiercer for the rain, and instead of murmuring as before, it was raging.  It began to get light.  The grey, dingy morning, and the clouds racing towards the west to overtake the storm-clouds, the mountains girt with mist, and the wet trees, all struck the deacon as ugly and sinister.  He washed at the brook, repeated his morning prayer, and felt a longing for tea and hot rolls, with sour cream, which were served every morning at his father-in-law’s.  He remembered his wife and the “Days past Recall,” which she played on the piano.  What sort of woman was she?  His wife had been introduced, betrothed, and married to him all in one week:  he had lived with her less than a month when he was ordered here, so that he had not had time to find out what she was like.  All the same, he rather missed her.

“I must write her a nice letter . . .” he thought.  The flag on the duhan hung limp, soaked by the rain, and the duhan itself with its wet roof seemed darker and lower than it had been before.  Near the door was standing a cart; Kerbalay, with two mountaineers and a young Tatar woman in trousers—­no doubt Kerbalay’s wife or daughter—­were bringing sacks of something out of the duhan, and putting them on maize straw in the cart.

Near the cart stood a pair of asses hanging their heads.  When they had put in all the sacks, the mountaineers and the Tatar woman began covering them over with straw, while Kerbalay began hurriedly harnessing the asses.

“Smuggling, perhaps,” thought the deacon.

Here was the fallen tree with the dried pine-needles, here was the blackened patch from the fire.  He remembered the picnic and all its incidents, the fire, the singing of the mountaineers, his sweet dreams of becoming a bishop, and of the Church procession. . . .  The Black River had grown blacker and broader with the rain.  The deacon walked cautiously over the narrow bridge, which by now was reached by the topmost crests of the dirty water, and went up through the little copse to the drying-shed.

“A splendid head,” he thought, stretching himself on the straw, and thinking of Von Koren.  “A fine head—­God grant him health; only there is cruelty in him. . . .”

Why did he hate Laevsky and Laevsky hate him?  Why were they going to fight a duel?  If from their childhood they had known poverty as the deacon had; if they had been brought up among ignorant, hard-hearted, grasping, coarse and ill-mannered people who grudged you a crust of bread, who spat on the floor and hiccoughed at dinner and at prayers; if they had not been spoilt from childhood by the pleasant surroundings and the select circle of friends they lived in—­how they would have rushed at each other, how readily they would have overlooked each other’s shortcomings and would have prized each other’s strong points!  Why, how few even outwardly decent people there were