I rose and said to Ivan: "Good-by, brother. Greet them all for me and ask them to forgive me." But Kostia pushed me and commanded me severely: "Go along! Whom are you greeting? They are all taken like hens for the market." We went along. Kostia went ahead, telling me in a low voice all that he saw below, and I followed him. But I was pulled from all sides, by my hands and the skirts of my coat, as if some one were asking me: "Where are you going? You have entrapped people and you yourself are escaping." I spoke aloud, to myself: "So on account of me people were lost!" The boy answered: "Not on account of you, but on account of truth. Are you truth? What a queer fellow!" His words were funny and he himself was small, but still they struck home. I wanted to set myself right before him, and I laid out my thoughts as a beggar lays out the crumbs from his bag. "Yes," I said, "it is evident that a great untruth lives within me." He muttered, answering each one of my words like a conscience: "Why great? You must always have something greater in you than any one else." "Those are not his words," I thought. "He has copied them from some one." "Kostin was right when he called you a bell tower. But you are not the kind that rings only for mass, but one which rings by itself, because it was built crooked and the bells are badly hung." He remained silent, and then he added: "I don't like you, Monk. You are so strange." "How?" "I don't know. Are you really a Russian? I don't think you are good." At any other time I would have become angry, but now I was silent. I became suddenly weak, tired unto death. Night and the wood were around us. Between the trees the gray darkness fell thickly and became dense. It w as difficult to tell which was night and which was tree. The moonbeams glistened above, broke themselves upon the body of the darkness and vanished. It was quiet. All these people, beginning with Juna, bore no fear. Some were filled with anger, others were always gay, and most of them were quiet, modest people, who seemed to be ashamed to show their goodness. Kostia walked along the path, and his blond head shone like a light before me. I recalled the youth of Bartholomew, the God-child Alexei and others. No, that was not the right! My thoughts were like water-hens in a puddle, jumping from stump to stump. "Have you read the 4 Lives of the Saints'?" I asked the boy. "I read them when I was little. My mother made me. Why?" "Did you like those chosen ones of God?" "I don't know. Ponteleimon I liked; and George also. He fought with the dragon. But I don't know what good it did the people to have dozens of them made holy." Kostia grew in my eyes. "If a Czar's daughter or a rich man's daughter believed in Christ and underwent martyrdom for her belief, neither the Czar nor the kingdom were ever better to the people for it? It is not spoken of in the legends that the tyrant Czars became good." Then, after a silence, he said: