"Once," continued the advocate, after a sip of water, "a change came into his life: there came flying along a carriage on rubber tires drawn by two runaway horses. The driver already lay some distance off on the pavement with a cracked skull. The terrified horses foamed at the mouth, sparks shot from their hoofs, their eyes shone like fiery lamps on a winter's night--and in the carriage, more dead than alive, sat a man. "And Bontzye stopped the horses. And the man he had saved was a charitable Jew, who was not ungrateful. "He put the dead man's whip into Bontzye's hands, and Bontzye became a coachman. More than that--he was provided with a wife, and more still--with a child. "And Bontzye kept silent!" "Me, they mean me!" Bontzye assured himself again, and yet had not the courage to give a glance at the Heavenly Court. He listens to the advocate further: "He kept silent also when his protector became bankrupt and did not pay him his wages. "He kept silent when his wife ran away from him, leaving him a child at the breast. "He was silent also fifteen years later, when the child had grown up and was strong enough to throw him out of the house." "Me, they mean me!" Now he is sure of it. * * * * * "He kept silent even," began the angelic advocate once more in a still softer and sadder voice, "when the same philanthropist paid all his creditors their due but him--and even when (riding once again in a carriage with rubber tires and fiery horses) he knocked Bontzye down and drove over him. "He kept silent. He did not even tell the police who had done for him." * * * * * "He kept silent even in the hospital, where one may cry out. "He kept silent when the doctor would not come to his bedside without being paid fifteen kopeks, and when the attendant demanded another five--for changing his linen. "He kept silent in the death-struggle--silent in death. "Not a word against God; not a word against men! "_Dixi!_" * * * * * Once more Bontzye trembled all over, he knew that after the advocate comes the prosecutor. Who knows what _he_ will say? Bontzye himself had remembered nothing of his life. Even in the other world he forgot every moment what had happened in the one before. The advocate had recalled everything to his mind. Who knows what the prosecutor will not remind him of? "Gentlemen," begins the prosecutor, in a voice biting and acid as vinegar--but he breaks off. "Gentlemen," he begins again, but his voice is milder, and a second time he breaks off. Then, from out the same throat, comes in a voice that is almost gentle: "Gentlemen! _He_ was silent! I will be silent, too!" There is a hush--and there sounds in front a new, soft, trembling voice: "Bontzye, my child," it speaks like a harp, "my dear child Bontzye!"