Another case was that of a parricide, a young man of noble birth who had filled the post of a public functionary. A wastrel, a spendthrift and a reckless gambler, he had been a cause of constant annoyance to his father, who remonstrated with him in vain. The son had reason to believe that he would inherit a substantial sum from his father, so he killed him in order to come into the estate more quickly and thus continue his debaucheries. Presently the corpse was unearthed from a drain; the head had been severed and placed on a cushion beside the body. The parricide’s crime was brought home to him, he was tried and convicted, degraded and deprived of his privileges, and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour. At the _ostrog_ he was despised by his fellow convicts because he was shameless and permitted himself to talk lightly of his crime. He sometimes spoke of his father with extraordinary callousness, and once, in boasting of the hereditary good health of his family, quietly remarked, “My father, for example, never was ill until the day of his death”—by the hand of his unnatural son.[3] Footnote 3: In the latter part of his book Dostoyevski corrects this early account of the supposed parricide, and tells us that it was all a mistake. It was a grave case of judicial error. The convict, when he had served ten years’ imprisonment, was proved to be entirely innocent. When the real murderers had been discovered and had confessed their crime, the wronged man was set at liberty. This animal insensibility carried so far was no doubt phenomenal. It showed an organic defect in the man’s nature, but conscience still lurked in its lowest depths, and there were times when he was vexed and tormented by great agitation in his sleep, when he cried aloud, “Hold him! Cut off his head!” Outwardly, in his waking hours, he never showed the slightest signs of remorse or repentance, and this is characteristic of the great bulk of criminals. Dostoyevski avers that in all the years he mixed with them he never noticed even the most fugitive indication of regret or moral compunction for crimes committed. “The criminal,” he adds, “who has revolted against society, hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Is he not, moreover, undergoing his punishment? Accordingly, he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes.”