"That dark one, Ratkof, is a good man. He lives according to the new law and takes the part of the oppressed. A policeman once beat me with a club and he immediately felled the policeman to the ground. He had to sit fourteen days for it. 'How can you fight the authorities?' I asked him when he came out. He immediately explained his law to me. I went to the priest, and the priest said, 'Ah, are these the thoughts you are plaiting?' Ratkof was sent to the prison in the city. He sat three months, and I nineteen days. 'What did he say?' they asked me there. 'Nothing.' 'What did he teach?' 'He taught nothing.' I am no fool myself. Ratkof came out. 'Forgive me,' I said to him, 'I was a fool.' But he laughed. 'It was nonsense,' he said." My guide remained silent, and then, in a new voice, and lower, he continued: "Everything is nonsense to him. He spits blood, that is nonsense; he starves, that too is nonsense." Suddenly he began to swear grossly, turned about and faced me, and hissed through his teeth: "I can understand everything. My brother died--that happens in the military. My sister's case is not a rare one. But why do they torture that man to death? That I cannot understand. I go like a dog wherever he sends me. He calls me Earth. 'Eh, you Earth,' he says and laughs. But the fact that they are always torturing him, that is like a knife in my heart!" And again he began to swear like a drunken monk. The ravine opened, broadened its walls down into the field, leveled them and vanished into the darkness. "Well," said my guide, "good-by." He pointed out to me the road to Omsk, turned back and disappeared. He was still without his cap. When his heavy steps died in the stillness I sat down, not desiring to go farther. The night lay heavily on the earth and slept, fresh, and thick, like oil. There were no stars in the heavens, no moon, no light about. But there was warmth and light within me. The heavy words of my guide burned within my memory. He was like a bell that had lain a long time on the earth, and had been covered by it and eaten out by rust, and though his tone was dull yet there was a new sound in it. The village people stood before my eyes as they listened to my speech seriously and wonderingly. Their troubled faces passed before me as they dragged me away from the police. "Is that the way it is?" I thought, marveling, and I could scarcely believe what had happened to me. Again I thought. "This young man seeks signs and omens. He himself is a miracle. It is a miracle to preserve love for man in this horrible life. And the crowd who heard me, that, too, was a miracle, that it should not be deaf or blind, though many for a long time have tried to deafen and blind it. And a still greater miracle were Mikhail and his comrades." My thoughts flowed calmly and easily. I was unaccustomed to it and did not expect it. I examined myself carefully, searched my heart quietly, wishing to find there anxiety and troubled doubt.