grow with him; and by the time he’s a grown-up fowl, they’re grown-up thoughts.... No, no, mates! it isn’t a temperature of fifty degrees, or whatever it is, that does it; it’s a soul speaking to a soul!... It’s all the same with people. If a woman with child gets frightened at a fire, and beats her head with her two hands, her child is born with marks on its head—it’s just the same thing here. The hen thinks it over, and sighs, and remembers all her youth, and everything that happened afterwards; and all that enters into the chicken’s soul.... Why are so many cocks hatched? Because the hen thinks so much about the cock, of course; she remembers all his feathers.... Everybody knows that if a peasant goes to the priest, or the _starshinà_,[44] or the village clerk, he always take a cock for a present. The hens think a great deal about cocks. So, you see, all these thoughts and cares pass from the hen’s soul into the chicken’s; and the chicken gets to understand that it will have to be young and unmarried, and then that cocks will come, and it will have to lay eggs.... All that passes into its soul while it’s in the egg.... But there is nothing of all that in hot water; there’s nothing but temperature in it.... Do you suppose temperature thinks about a hen’s life? Do you suppose temperature thinks about cocks?—about how tired it is of sitting, but how it must keep on for the baby’s sake? It doesn’t think about anything at all! And that’s why the chicken comes out without any soul, or mind, or conscience, and doesn’t care for anything.... It’s just like with the ’lectric light—it can’t make the grass grow.... That’s what God is!... It isn’t twaddle, mates; don’t you believe it! A soul’s one thing, and a make-up’s another. No, no, it isn’t twaddle; it’s a thing that takes a lot of understanding!” “I don’t know,” remarked the other man, indifferently; “it’s a bit too learned for me.... Seems to me like as if there aren’t any other souls except Christian souls.... And as for a hen’s conscience, I don’t know about that ... don’t see it at all!” “That’s just what I say: you don’t know.” The discussion was evidently finished. But as the train had not yet come, and no one had anything to do, the company would have found it a little awkward to let the conversation drop at the conclusion of the poultry-farmers speech. Every one felt (as is the case at the meetings of learned societies) the need of _some_ kind of answer or continuation. After a moment’s silence, therefore, one of the silhouettes (I think, from his voice, it was the one who had laid the suicide of the publican to the devil’s account) suddenly remarked—