Andrey Hrisanfitch, hearing this, recalled that his wife had on three or four occasions given him letters and asked him to send them to the country, but some important business had always prevented him; he had not sent them, and the letters somehow got lost. “And little hares run about in the fields,” Yefimya went on chanting, kissing her boy and shedding tears. “Grandfather is kind and gentle; granny is good, too--kind-hearted. They are warm-hearted in the country, they are God-fearing... and there is a little church in the village; the peasants sing in the choir. Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother and Defender, take us away from here!” Andrey Hrisanfitch returned to his room to smoke a little till there was another ring at the door, and Yefimya ceased speaking, subsided, and wiped her eyes, though her lips were still quivering. She was very much frightened of him--oh, how frightened of him! She trembled and was reduced to terror by the sound of his steps, by the look in his eyes, and dared not utter a word in his presence. Andrey Hrisanfitch lighted a cigarette, but at that very moment there was a ring from upstairs. He put out his cigarette, and, assuming a very grave face, hastened to his front door. The general was coming downstairs, fresh and rosy from his bath. “And what is there in that room?” he asked, pointing to a door. Andrey Hrisanfitch put his hands down swiftly to the seams of his trousers, and pronounced loudly: “Charcot douche, your Excellency!” GUSEV I IT was getting dark; it would soon be night. Gusev, a discharged soldier, sat up in his hammock and said in an undertone: “I say, Pavel Ivanitch. A soldier at Sutchan told me: while they were sailing a big fish came into collision with their ship and stove a hole in it.” The nondescript individual whom he was addressing, and whom everyone in the ship’s hospital called Pavel Ivanitch, was silent, as though he had not heard. And again a stillness followed... The wind frolicked with the rigging, the screw throbbed, the waves lashed, the hammocks creaked, but the ear had long ago become accustomed to these sounds, and it seemed that everything around was asleep and silent. It was dreary. The three invalids--two soldiers and a sailor--who had been playing cards all the day were asleep and talking in their dreams. It seemed as though the ship were beginning to rock. The hammock slowly rose and fell under Gusev, as though it were heaving a sigh, and this was repeated once, twice, three times.... Something crashed on to the floor with a clang: it must have been a jug falling down. “The wind has broken loose from its chain...” said Gusev, listening. This time Pavel Ivanitch cleared his throat and answered irritably: “One minute a vessel’s running into a fish, the next, the wind’s breaking loose from its chain. Is the wind a beast that it can break loose from its chain?” “That’s how christened folk talk.”