her with him to Girino to church. They’d stand hand in hand on the ferry, and he not taking his eyes from her. ‘Yes, Simon,’ he would say, ‘even in Siberia people live. Even in Siberia there is happiness. Just look what a daughter I’ve got! You can’t find another like her if you seek a thousand miles around!’ The girl, as I said, was really a beauty.... But I thought to myself: ‘Just wait.... She’s a young girl; the blood tingles, and one wants to live, and what sort of life is to be had here?’ And, comrade, to make the story short, she really began to ail.... She got to coughing, and coughing, to pining away; and now she is very sick, can hardly stand on her legs. Consumption! There’s your Siberian happiness for you--the deuce take it!--that’s how even in Siberia people live.... Now he’s begun to chase after doctors, and to bring them back home with him. Let him but hear there’s a doctor or a healer within two hundred or three hundred versts, and off he goes after him. It’s terrible to think how much money he has spent on doctors. I’d rather drink up the money.... She’ll die, any way. She’ll die, there’s no gainsaying that, and then he’ll be lost altogether. He’ll hang himself from sorrow, or he’ll escape to Russia--and then you know what will happen. He’ll be caught, sentenced to hard labor; he’ll taste the knout....” “That is well,” murmured the Tartar, trembling with cold. “What is well?” asked Wiseacre. “He’s had his wife, his daughter.... You say you want nothing. To have nothing is bad! His wife lived with him three years--God was good to him. To have nothing is bad, but three years is good. Don’t you understand?” Trembling with cold, stammering out with difficulty the few Russian words he knew, the Tartar expressed the hope that God might preserve him from dying in a strange land and being buried in a cold, blighted earth; if his wife should come only for a single day, for a single hour, he would consent, for the sake of this brief happiness, to undergo the worst tortures and thank God for them. Better one day of happiness than nothing! Again he spoke of the handsome and clever wife he had left at home; then, putting his hands to his head, he began to cry and to assure Simon that he was innocent and was undergoing punishment for no just cause. His two brothers and an uncle had stolen some horses from a _muzhik_ and had beaten the old man half to death; but society dealt with him unjustly, and sent the three brothers to Siberia, while the uncle, a rich man, remained at home. “You’ll get used to it,” said Simon. The Tartar did not reply, but fixed a tearful gaze upon the fire. His face expressed doubt and alarm, as if he still did not understand why he was here in this darkness and cold, among strangers, and not at home. Wiseacre lay beside the fire, chuckled at something, and hummed.