“Well?” I asked him. “Have you found Ilya Stepanitch?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where?”

“Here, not far away.”

“How . . . have you found him? Is he alive?”

“To be sure. I have been talking to him.” (A load was lifted from my heart.) “His honour was sitting in his great-coat under a birch tree . . . and he was all right. I put it to him, ‘Won’t you come home, Ilya Stepanitch; Alexandr Vassilitch is very much worried about you.’ And he said to me, ‘What does he want to worry for! I want to be in the fresh air. My head aches. Go home,’ he said, ‘and I will come later.’”

“And you left him?” I cried, clasping my hands.

“What else could I do? He told me to go . . . how could I stay?”

All my fears came back to me at once.

“Take me to him this minute — do you hear? This minute! O Semyon, Semyon, I did not expect this of you! You say he is not far off?”

“He is quite close, here, where the copse begins — he is sitting there. It is not more than five yards from the river bank. I found him as I came alongside the river.”

“Well, take me to him, take me to him.”

Semyon set off ahead of me. “This way, sir. . . . We have only to get down to the river and it is close there.”

But instead of getting down to the river we got into a hollow and found ourselves before an empty shed.

“Hey, stop!” Semyon cried suddenly. “I must have come too far to the right. . . . We must go that way, more to the left. . . . ”

We turned to the left — and found ourselves among such high, rank weeds that we could scarcely get out. . . . I could not remember such a tangled growth of weeds anywhere near our village. And then all at once a marsh was squelching under our feet, and we saw little round moss-covered hillocks which I had never noticed before either. . . . We turned back — a small hill was sharply before us and on the top of it stood a shanty — and in it someone was snoring. Semyon and I shouted several times into the shanty; something stirred at the further end of it, the straw ............