"The emperor's son fell ill with consumption through smoking, and
died when he was twenty. His infirm and sick old father was left
without anyone to help him. There was no one to govern the kingdom
and defend the palace. Enemies came, killed the old man, and destroyed
the palace, and now there are neither cherries, nor birds, nor
little bells in the garden. . . . That's what happened."

This ending struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as absurd and naïve, but the
whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha. Again his eyes
were clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute
he looked pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a
sinking voice:

"I am not going to smoke any more. . . ."

When he had said good-night and gone away his father walked up and
down the room and smiled to himself.

"They would tell me it was the influence of beauty, artistic form,"
he meditated. "It may be so, but that's no comfort. It's not the
right way, all the same. . . . Why must morality and truth never
be offered in their crude form, but only with embellishments,
sweetened and gilded like pills? It's not normal. . . . It's
falsification . . . deception . . . tricks . . . ."

He thought of the jurymen to whom it was absolutely necessary to
make a "speech," of the general public who absorb history only from
legends and historical novels, and of himself and how he had gathered
an understanding of life not from sermons and laws, but from fables,