Where will he be a year hence? Will he again climb up this tower, to this platform under the great brass bell, and, with a resounding peal, awaken the slumbering night; or will he lie there, below, in a dark corner of the cemetery, under a wooden cross? God knows . . . He is ready, but God has granted him to meet at least another spring holiday. "Glory be to the Lord," whisper his lips, repeating the formula he knows so well, and Mikheich, making the sign of the cross, looks upward into the starry sky that burns as with a million lights.
"Mikheich, eh, Mikheich!" a trembling old voice calls to him from below. The old deacon looks up from the ground, shielding his watery eyes with the palm of his hand, but he does not see Mikheich.
"What is it? I am here," answers the bell-ringer, leaning over the rail. "Don't you see me?"
"No. Isn't it time to strike? What do you think?"
Both look up at the stars. Thousands of God's bright eyes shine upon them from above. The fiery constellation is already high above the horizon. Mikheich is considering . . .
"No, I guess we'll wait awhile . . . I know my time."
He knows it well enough. He does not need a clock, for God's stars will tell him when the right time comes. The earth and the sky, and the little white cloud that sails through the blue, and the dark forest whispering something there below, and the splashing of the little river invisible in the darkness—all this is so familiar to him, so near. It is not in vain that he has spent his whole life here.
The far-away past springs into life again. He remembers how he climbed this tower for the first time, when he was still a child and his father brought him there. He sees himself as a little, blond-haired boy; his eyes are burning with excitement; the wind—not the wind that whirls the dust through the village street, but a different one, one that shakes its invisible wings high above the ground—raises his soft hair, making it flutter in the air . . . And there, far, far below, little human figures are moving to and fro, and the little houses of the village stand around, and the forest seems to be so far away, while the round clearing, in the middle of which stands the village, seems so large, almost limitless.
"Yet, there it is, the whole of it," smiles the gray-haired old man, as he casts his eye over the little clearing.
And the whole of life is like this. In childhood it seems that life has no end, no limit. Yet, there it is, as if represented on the palm of his hand, from its very beginning to that quiet
