Unfortunately, among junipers, as along fences, snow-drifts form sometimes. Klen passed through a number of these, and became so exhausted that finally he said to himself,-- "I will sit down. Unless I fall asleep I shall not freeze; and to keep from sleeping, I will play again, 'My Green Pitcher.'" He sat down, played again, again the vanishing voice of the hautboy was heard in the silence of night, and over the snow. But Klen's eyelids stuck together more and more, and the notes of the "Green Pitcher," growing weaker, and gradually growing silent, were silent altogether at last. Still he struggled against sleep; he was conscious yet; he was thinking still of Olka; but at the same time he felt himself in a greater desert, more and more alone, as if forgotten; and wonderment seized him that she was not there with him in that loneliness and that night. He murmured, "Olka! where art thou?" And once more he spoke as if calling her,-- "Olka!" The hautboy dropped from his stiffened hands. Next morning the dawn shone on his sitting figure, with the hautboy near his long legs, and his face was blue, astonished as it were, and at the same time fixed in listening to the last note of the song, "My Green Pitcher." LUX IN TENEBRIS LUCET[12] [12] Light shineth in the darkness. Sometimes in the autumn, especially in November, such wet and gloomy days come that life becomes repulsive even to a healthy man. From the time that Kamionka had fallen ill and stopped work on his statue of "Compassion," bad weather had caused him more suffering than sickness itself. Every morning, when he had dragged his body out of bed, he rubbed the great sweating window of his studio and looked upward, in the hope that he would see some little strip of blue sky; but every morning disappointment awaited him. An oppressive lead-colored mist hung over the earth; rain was not falling, still the paving stones in the yard looked like sponges soaked in liquid; everything was wet, slippery, penetrated through and through with water, single drops of which falling from the eave-troughs sounded with a peculiar and desperate monotony, as if measuring that sluggish time of sadness. The window of the studio looked out on a courtyard, which was bounded by a garden. The grass beyond the paling was green yet with a sort of sickly greenness, in which were death and decay; but the trees with their yellow leaves, and their branches black from dampness and also effaced by the mist somewhat, seemed dead altogether. From among those trees came every evening the cawing of crows, which had flown in from the forests and fields to the city for winter quarters, and which, with a great clattering of wings, settled down for the night on the branches.