And if you had happened to be sitting on the ground with your back against one of the wooden houses inside the great stockade that day, this is what you would have seen, just as Paul Pavlof saw it. Up above, a blue, rain-washed sky, with a clear sun struggling blessedly to warmth; all round, whichever way you looked, the sharp teeth of the high wooden stockade, set in a savage snarl at the world in general, and biting viciously into the soft blue of the sky; many long, rough log houses with grated windows and heavily padlocked doors; a wooden church with pointed spire; black and white sentry boxes every here and there, each with its Imperial watch-dog in the person of a green-coated Cossack, who leaned stolidly on his bayoneted rifle, and in his dull, uninterested regard of his charges, showed plainly that he considered them of a lower breed even than himself. The ground was churned into mud with the restless tramping to and fro of droves of shaggy, unkempt prisoners in long grey overcoats and flat grey caps. They walked for the most part in silence--a silence that was fretted with the discordant jingling of leg fetters. The sound of chains in connection with one's fellows produces a natural repulsion in most minds, but Pavlof had grown used to it. He sat on the dryest spot he had been able to find, with his back against the rough logs of the house, and watched his companions with interest, almost with enjoyment. To a starving dog even a sour crust is treasure-trove. When one has been hermetically sealed in a stone cell for many months, the generous freedom of the prison enclosure, its wonderful height from mud to sky, the great stretch that lay between its rows of grinning teeth--why, it was resurrection. And contact with humanity and freedom of intercourse are things to be grateful for. For humanity, even in the dregs, debased, dirty, disgusting in its details at times, is still preferable to the automatic machinery in human form which attends to one's more pressing outward needs, but is deaf and blind and dumb to all else, in the sepulchral silence of the stone bags of Schlusselburg. A year of close confinement had wrought some changes in Pavlof, though not so great as might have been apparent in a softer-bred man. He was always lean and eager of face, and spare and tall. He looked taller and thinner, and perhaps a trifle leaner of face and more cavernous about the deep-set eyes, and the careless sprawl of his limbs as he sat betokened a certain listlessness even in his novel enjoyment of observation.