I liked being in church; I could rest there as I rested in the forests and fields. My small heart, which was already familiar with grief and soiled by the mire of a coarse life, laved itself in hazy, ardent dreams. But I went to church only during the hard frosts, or when a snow-storm swept wildly up the streets, when it seemed as if the very sky were frozen, and the wind swept across it with a cloud of snow, and the earth lay frozen under the snow-drifts as if it would never live again. When the nights were milder I used to like to wander through the streets of the town, creeping along by all the darkest corners. Sometimes I seemed to walk as if I had wings, flying along like the moon in the sky. My shadow crept in front of me, extinguishing the sparkles of light in the snow, bobbing up and down comically. The night watchman patrolled the streets, rattle in hand, clothed in a heavy sheepskin, his dog at his side. Vague outlines of people came out of yards and flitted along the streets, and the dog gave chase. Sometimes I met gay young ladies with their escorts. I had an idea that they also were playing truant from vespers. Sometimes through a lighted _fortochka_[1] there came a peculiar smell, faint, unfamiliar, suggestive of a kind of life of which I was ignorant. I used to stand under the windows and inhale it, trying to guess what it was to live like the people in such a house lived. It was the hour of vespers, and yet they were singing merrily, laughing, and playing on a sort of guitar. The deep, stringy sound flowed through the _fortochka._ [Footnote 1: A small square of glass in the double window which is set on hinges and serves as a ventilator.] Of special interest to me were the one-storied, dwarfed houses at the corners of the deserted streets, Tikhonovski and Martinovski. I stood there on a moonlight night in mid-Lent and listened to the weird sounds--it sounded as if some one were singing loudly with his mouth closed--which floated out through the _fortochka_ together with a warm steam. The words were indistinguishable, but the song seemed to be familiar and intelligible to me; but when I listened to that, I could not hear the stringy sound which languidly interrupted the flow of song. I sat on the curbstone thinking what a wonderful melody was being played on some sort of insupportable violin--insupportable because it hurt me to listen to it. Sometimes they sang so loudly that the whole house seemed to shake, and the panes of the windows rattled. Like tears, drops fell from the roof, and from my eyes also. The night watchman had come close to me without my being aware of it, and, pushing me off the curbstone, said: "What are you stuck here for?" "The music," I explained. "A likely tale! Be off now!"