and now you see he has laid hands on himself.  There’s no sense in it, your honor, it’s not right, and there’s no making out what’s the meaning of it, merciful Lord!  Say your father was rich and you are poor; it is mortifying, there’s no doubt about it, but there, you must make up your mind to it.  I used to live in good style, too; I had two horses, your honor, three cows, I used to keep twenty head of sheep; but the time has come, and I am left with nothing but a wretched bag, and even that is not mine but Government property.  And now in our Nedoshtchotova, if the truth is to be told, my house is the worst of the lot.  Makey had four footmen, and now Makey is a footman himself.  Petrak had four laborers, and now Petrak is a laborer himself.”

“How was it you became poor?” asked the examining magistrate.

“My sons drink terribly.  I could not tell you how they drink, you wouldn’t believe it.”

Lyzhin listened and thought how he, Lyzhin, would go back sooner or later to Moscow, while this old man would stay here for ever, and would always be walking and walking.  And how many times in his life he would come across such battered, unkempt old men, not “men of any worth,” in whose souls fifteen kopecks, glasses of vodka, and a profound belief that you can’t get on in this life by dishonesty, were equally firmly rooted.

Then he grew tired of listening, and told the old man to bring him some hay for his bed, There was an iron bedstead with a pillow and a quilt in the traveler’s room, and it could be fetched in; but the dead man had been lying by it for nearly three days (and perhaps sitting on it just before his death), and it would be disagreeable to sleep upon it now....

“It’s only half-past seven,” thought Lyzhin, glancing at his watch.  “How awful it is!”

He was not sleepy, but having nothing to do to pass away the time, he lay down and covered himself with a rug.  Loshadin went in and out several times, clearing away the tea-things; smacking his lips and sighing, he kept tramping round the table; at last he took his little lamp and went out, and, looking at his long, gray-headed, bent figure from behind, Lyzhin thought: 

“Just like a magician in an opera.”

It was dark.  The moon must have been behind the clouds, as the windows and the snow on the window-frames could be seen distinctly.

“Oo-oo-oo!” sang the storm, “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”

“Ho-ho-ly sa-aints!” wailed a woman in the loft, or it sounded like it.  “Ho-ho-ly sa-aints!”

“B-booh!” something outside banged against the wall.  “Trah!”