I

THE evening service was being celebrated on the eve of Palm Sunday
in the Old Petrovsky Convent. When they began distributing the palm
it was close upon ten o'clock, the candles were burning dimly, the
wicks wanted snuffing; it was all in a sort of mist. In the twilight
of the church the crowd seemed heaving like the sea, and to Bishop
Pyotr, who had been unwell for the last three days, it seemed that
all the faces--old and young, men's and women's--were alike,
that everyone who came up for the palm had the same expression in
his eyes. In the mist he could not see the doors; the crowd kept
moving and looked as though there were no end to it. The female
choir was singing, a nun was reading the prayers for the day.

How stifling, how hot it was! How long the service went on! Bishop
Pyotr was tired. His breathing was laboured and rapid, his throat
was parched, his shoulders ached with weariness, his legs were
trembling. And it disturbed him unpleasantly when a religious maniac
uttered occasional shrieks in the gallery. And then all of a sudden,
as though in a dream or delirium, it seemed to the bishop as though
his own mother Marya Timofyevna, whom he had not seen for nine
years, or some old woman just like his mother, came up to him out
of the crowd, and, after taking a palm branch from him, walked away
looking at him all the while good-humouredly with a kind, joyful
smile until she was lost in the crowd. And for some reason tears
flowed down his face. There was peace in his heart, everything was
well, yet he kept gazing fixedly towards the left choir, where the
prayers were being read, where in the dusk of evening you could not
recognize anyone, and--wept. Tears glistened on his face and on