There had been in him also this wonderful quality,—­that after so many disappointments he was ever full of confidence, and did not lose hope that all would be well yet.  In winter he grew lively, and predicted great events.  He waited for these events with impatience, and lived with the thought of them whole summers.  But the winters passed one after another, and Skavinski lived only to this,—­that they whitened his head.  At last he grew old, began to lose energy; his endurance was becoming more and more like resignation, his former calmness was tending toward supersensitiveness, and that tempered soldier was degenerating into a man ready to shed tears for any cause.  Besides this, from time to time he was weighed down by a terrible homesickness which was roused by any circumstance,—­the sight of swallows, gray birds like sparrows, snow on the mountains, or melancholy music like that heard on a time.  Finally, there was one idea which mastered him,—­the idea of rest.  It mastered the old man thoroughly, and swallowed all other desires and hopes.  This ceaseless wanderer could not imagine anything more to be longed for, anything more precious, than a quiet corner in which to rest, and wait in silence for the end.  Perhaps specially because some whim of fate had so hurried him over all seas and lands that he could hardly catch his breath, did he imagine that the highest human happiness was simply not to wander.  It is true that such modest happiness was his due; but he was so accustomed to disappointments that he thought of rest as people in general think of something which is beyond reach.  He did not dare to hope for it.  Meanwhile, unexpectedly, in the course of twelve hours he had gained a position which was as if chosen for him out of all the world.  We are not to wonder, then, that when he lighted his lantern in the evening he became as it were dazed,—­that he asked himself if that was reality, and he did not dare to answer that it was.  But at the same time reality convinced him with incontrovertible proofs; hence hours one after another passed while he was on the balcony.  He gazed, and convinced himself.  It might seem that he was looking at the sea for the first time in his life.  The lens of the lantern cast into the darkness an enormous triangle of light, beyond which the eye of the old man was lost in the black distance completely, in the distance mysterious and awful.  But that distance seemed to run toward the light.  The long waves following one another rolled out from the darkness, and went bellowing toward the base of the island; and then their foaming backs were visible, shining rose-colored in the light of the lantern.  The incoming tide swelled more and more, and covered the sandy bars.  The mysterious speech of the ocean came with a fulness more powerful and louder, at one time like the thunder of cannon, at another like the roar of great forests, at another like the distant dull sound of the voices of people.  At moments it was quiet; then to the ears of the old