it is!  You catch an eel-pout or a roach of some sort and are as pleased as though you had met your own brother.  And would you believe it, there’s a special art for every fish:  you catch one with a live bait, you catch another with a grub, the third with a frog or a grasshopper.  One has to understand all that, of course!  For example, take the eel-pout.  It is not a delicate fish—­it will take a perch; and a pike loves a gudgeon, the shilishper likes a butterfly.  If you fish for a roach in a rapid stream there is no greater pleasure.  You throw the line of seventy feet without lead, with a butterfly or a beetle, so that the bait floats on the surface; you stand in the water without your trousers and let it go with the current, and tug! the roach pulls at it!  Only you have got to be artful that he doesn’t carry off the b ait, the damned rascal.  As soon as he tugs at your line you must whip it up; it’s no good waiting.  It’s wonderful what a lot of fish I’ve caught in my time.  When we were running away the other convicts would sleep in the forest; I could not sleep, but I was off to the river.  The rivers there are wide and rapid, the banks are steep—­awfully!  It’s all slumbering forests on the bank.  The trees are so tall that if you look to the top it makes you dizzy.  Every pine would be worth ten roubles by the prices here.”

In the overwhelming rush of his fancies, of artistic images of the past and sweet presentiments of happiness in the future, the poor wretch sank into silence, merely moving his lips as though whispering to himself.  The vacant, blissful smile never left his lips.  The constables were silent.  They were pondering with bent heads.  In the autumn stillness, when the cold, sullen mist that rises from the earth lies like a weight on the heart, when it stands like a prison wall before the eyes, and reminds man of the limitation of his freedom, it is sweet to think of the broad, rapid rivers, with steep banks wild and luxuriant, of the impenetrable forests, of the boundless steppes.  Slowly and quietly the fancy pictures how early in the morning, before the flush of dawn has left the sky, a man makes his way along the steep deserted bank like a tiny speck:  the ancient, mast-like pines rise up in terraces on both sides of the torrent, gaze sternly at the free man and murmur menacingly; rocks, huge stones, and thorny bushes bar his way, but he is strong in body and bold in spirit, and has no fear of the pine-trees, nor stones, nor of his solitude, nor of the reverberating echo which repeats the sound of every footstep that he takes.

The peasants called up a picture of a free life such as they had never lived; whether they vaguely recalled the images of stories heard long ago or whether notions of a free life had been handed down to them with their flesh and blood from far-off free ancestors, God knows!

The first to break the silence was Nikandr Sapozhnikov, who had not till then let fall a single word.  Whether he envied the tramp’s transparent happiness, or whether he felt in his heart that dreams of happiness were out of keeping with the grey fog and the dirty brown mud—­anyway, he looked sternly at the tramp and said: