The gruffer of the two voices pulled up the speaker. "To think," it said, "that you can actually talk about it all!" "Why shouldn't I? My father brought tears to the eyes of many an innocent person." "A fig for people's tears! If our causes of tears were one and all to be murdered, what would the state of things become? Shed tears, but never blood; for blood is not yours to shed. And even if you should believe your own blood to be your own, know that it is not so, that your blood does not belong to you, but to Someone Else." "The point in question was my father's property. It all shows how a man may live awhile, and earn his living, and then suddenly go amiss, and lose his wits, and even conceive a grudge against his own father.... Now I must get some sleep." Behind the bales all grew quiet. Presently I rose to peer in that direction. The passenger in the buff pea-jacket was sitting huddled up against a coil of rope, with his hands thrust into his sleeves, and his chin resting upon his arms. As the moon was shining straight into his face, I could see that the latter was as livid as that of a corpse, and had its brows drawn down over its narrow, insignificant eyes. Beside him, and close to my head, there was lying stretched on the top of the coil of rope a broad-shouldered peasant in a short smock and a pair of patched boots of white felt. The ringlets of the wearer's curly beard were thrust upwards, and his hands clasped behind his head, and with ox-like eyes he stared at the zenith where a few stars were shining, and the moon was beginning to sink. At length, in a trumpet-like voice (though he seemed to do his best to soften it) the peasant asked: "Your uncle is on that barge, I suppose?" "He is. And so is my brother." "Yet you are here! How strange!" The dark barge, towed against the steamer's blue-silver wash of foam, was cleaving it like a plough, while under the moon the lights of the barge showed white, and the hull and the prisoners' cage stood raised high out of the water as to our right the black, indentated bank glided past in sinuous convolutions. From the whole, soft, liquescent fluid scene, the impression which I derived was melancholy. It evoked in my spirit a sense of instability, a lack of restfulness. "Why are you travelling?" "Because I wish to have a word with him." "With your uncle?" "Yes." "About the property?" "What else?" "Then look here, my young fellow. Drop it all--both your uncle and the property, and betake yourself to a monastery, and there live and pray. For if you have shed blood, and especially if you have shed the blood of a kinsman, you will stand for ever estranged from all, while, moreover, bloodshed is a dangerous thing--it may at any time come back upon you." "But the property?" the young fellow asked with a lift of his head. "Let it go," the peasant vouchsafed as he closed his eyes.