The windows of the tavern were open, while in the pendent, undulating cloud of blue smoke that the flames of the lamps emitted, those lamps looked like so many yellow pitchers floating amid the waters of a stagnant pond. Out of doors there was brooding the quiet of an August night, and not a rustle, not a whisper was there to be heard. Hence, as numbed with melancholy, I gazed at the inky heavens and limpid stars I thought to myself: "Surely, never were the sky and the stars meant to look down upon a life like this, a life like this?" Suddenly someone said with the subdued assurance of a person reading aloud from a written document: "Unless the peasants of Kubarovo keep a watch upon their timber lands, the sun will fire them tomorrow, and then the Birkins' forest also will catch alight." For a moment the dispute died down. Then, as it were cleaving the silence, a voice said stutteringly: "Who cares about the significance of the word 'truth'?" And the words--heavy, jumbled, and clumsy--filled me with despondent reflections. Then again the voices rose--this time in louder and more venomous accents, and with their din recalled to me, by some accident, the foolish lines: The gods did give men water To wash in, and to drink; Yet man has made it but a pool In which his woes to sink. Presently I moved outside and, seating myself on the steps of the veranda, fell to contemplating the dull, blurred windows of the Archpriest's house on the other side of the square, and to watching how black shadows kept flitting to and fro behind their panes as the faint, lugubrious notes of a guitar made themselves heard. And a high-pitched, irritable voice kept repeating at intervals: "Allow me. Pray, permit me to speak," and being answered by a voice which intermittently shot into the silence, as into a bottomless sack, the words: "No, do you wait a moment, do you wait a moment." Surrounded by the darkness, the houses looked stunted like gravestones, with a line of black trees above their roofs that loomed shadowy and cloud-like. Only in the furthest corner of the expanse was the light of a solitary street lamp bearing a resemblance to the disk of a stationary, resplendent dandelion. Over everything was melancholy. Far from inviting was the general outlook. So much was this the case that, had, at that moment, anyone stolen upon me from behind the bushes and dealt me a sudden blow on the head, I should merely have sunk to earth without attempting to see who my assailant had been. Often, in those days, was I in this mood, for it clave to me as faithfully as a dog--never did it wholly leave me. "It was for men like THOSE that this fair earth of ours was bestowed upon us!" I thought to myself. Suddenly, with a clatter, someone ran out of the door of the tavern, slid down the steps, fell headlong at their foot, quickly regained his equilibrium, and disappeared in the darkness after exclaiming in a threatening voice: