The Little Russians were from the Tchernigoff Government. This he had always thought of as a far-away region with a sky of dim, gloomy blue above the forests. These men, who had gone through a hand-to-hand encounter with the mad wolf, reminded him of the days of Vladimir, the life of long ago, of ancient peasant life in the pine forests. And as he proceeded to get drunk, pouring out glass after glass of liquor with hands shaking after the row, Kuzma became transported with delight: “Akh, that was a great epoch!” He was choking with wrath at the gendarme, and at those meek cattle in their long-tailed coats. Stupid, savage, curse them! But--Russia, ancient Russia! And tears of drunken joy and fervour, which distorted every picture to supernatural dimensions, obscured Kuzma’s vision. “But how about non-resistance?” recurred to his mind at intervals, and he shook his head with a grin. A trim young officer was eating his dinner, with his back to him, at the general table; and Kuzma gazed in an amicably insolent manner at his white linen uniform blouse, so short, so high-waisted, that he wanted to step up to him and pull it down. “And I will do that!” thought Kuzma. “But he would jump up and shout--and slap my face! There’s non-resistance for you!” Then he journeyed on to Kieff and, completely abandoning his business, spent three days roaming about the city and on the bluffs above the Dnyepr, in the joyous excitement induced by his intoxication. In the Cathedral of St. Sophia, at the Liturgy, many persons stared in amazement at the thin, broad-shouldered katzap[17] who stood in front of Yaroslaff’s[18] tomb. He was neatly dressed, held in his hand a new peaked cap, stood with decorum; but there was something queer in his general appearance. The service came to an end: the congregation departed, and the doors were opened; the verger extinguished the candles. Through the upper windows, athwart the blue smoke, filtered golden streaks of the hot noonday sun; but he, with set teeth, his sparse greying beard drooping on his breast and his deeply sunken eyes closed in a sort of happy pain, remained there listening to the pealing of the bells, carolling and dully booming above the cathedral--that ancient peal which had, in days of yore, accompanied the campaigns against the Petchenyegi.[19] And, toward evening, Kuzma was seen at the Lavra.[20] He was sitting opposite its gate beneath a withered acacia, alongside a crippled lad, gazing with a troubled, melancholy smile at its white walls and enclosures, at the gold of its little cupolas shining against the pure autumnal sky. The lad had no cap, a sack of coarse linen hung over his shoulder, and on his body hung dirty, ragged old garments; in one hand he held a wooden cup, with a kopek in the bottom, while with the other he incessantly changed the position of his deformed leg--which was bare to the knee, withered and unnaturally thin, burned black by the sun, and covered with a thick growth of