"Vanka passes by the churchyard, That is a very simple matter! Ach! Vanka, draw your horns in For you won't get beyond the graveyard! "I don't think that is at all funny, but it is true! As you can't come back, you can't see beyond the graveyard. In that case it is the same to me whether I am a convict, or a warder over convicts." He grew tired of talking, drank his vodka, and looked into the empty decanter with one eye, like a bird. He silently lighted another cigarette, blowing the smoke through his mustache. "Don't struggle, don't hope for anything, for the grave and the churchyard let no man pass them," the mason, Petr, used to say sometimes, yet he was absolutely dissimilar to Uncle Yaakov. How many such sayings I knew already! I had nothing more to ask my uncle about. It was melancholy to be with him, and I was sorry for him. I kept recalling his lively songs and the sound of the guitar which produced joy out of a gentle melancholy. I had not forgotten merry Tzigan. I had not forgotten, and as I looked at the battered countenance of Uncle Yaakov, I thought involuntarily: "Does he remember how he crushed Tzigan to death with the cross?" But I had no desire to ask him about it. I looked into the causeway, which was flooded with a gray August fog. The smell of apples and melons floated up to me. Along the narrow streets of the town the lamps gleamed; I knew it all by heart. At that moment I heard the siren of the Ribinsk steamer, and then of that other which was bound for Perm. "Well, we 'd better go," said my uncle. At the door of the tavern as he shook my hand he said jokingly: "Don't be a hypochondriac. You are rather inclined that way, eh? Spit on it! You are young. The chief thing you have to remember is that 'Fate is no hindrance to happiness.' Well, good-by; I am going to Uspen!" My cheerful uncle left me more bewildered than ever by his conversation. I walked up to the town and came out in the fields. It was midnight; heavy clouds floated in the sky, obliterating my shadow on the earth by their own black shadows. Leaving the town for the fields, I reached the Volga, and there I lay in the dusty grass and looked for a long time at the river, the meadow, on that motionless earth. Across the Volga the shadows of the clouds floated slowly; by the time they had reached the meadows they looked brighter, as if they had been washed in the water of the river. Everything around seemed half asleep, stupefied as it were, moving unwillingly, and only because it was compelled to do so, and not from a flaming love of movement and life. And I desired so ardently to cast a beneficent spell over the whole earth and myself, which would cause every one, myself included, to be swept by a joyful whirlwind, a festival dance of people, loving one another in this life, spending their lives for the sake of others, beautiful, brave, honorable. I thought: "I must do something for myself, or I shall be ruined."