‘Just as they, just as Daddy Eroshka, I shall live awhile and die, and as he says truly:

“grass will grow and nothing more”.

‘But what though the grass does grow?’ he continued thinking. ‘Still I must live and be happy, because happiness is all I desire. Never mind what I am — an animal like all the rest, above whom the grass will grow and nothing more; or a frame in which a bit of the one God has been set, — still I must live in the very best way.

How then must I live to be happy, and why was I not happy before?’ And he began to recall his former life and he felt disgusted with himself. He appeared to himself to have been terribly exacting and selfish, though he now saw that all the while he really