judge, but statisticians, for the purpose of supplying information for
particular special tables. Three of them, one woman and two men, gave
their real names, while two others refused and thus remained unknown
to the judges.

They manifested for all that was going on at the trial a certain
curiosity, softened, as though through a haze, such as is peculiar to
persons who are very ill or are carried away by some great,
all-absorbing idea. They glanced up occasionally, caught some word in
the air more interesting than the others, and then resumed the thought
from which their attention had been distracted.

The man who was nearest to the judges called himself Sergey Golovin,
the son of a retired colonel, himself tin ex-officer. He was still a
very young, light-haired, broad-shouldered man, so strong that neither
the prison nor the expectation of inevitable death could remove the
color from his cheeks and the expression of youthful, happy frankness
from his blue eyes. He kept energetically tugging at his bushy, small
beard, to which he had not become accustomed, and continually
blinking, kept looking out of the window.

It was toward the end of winter, when amidst the snowstorms and the
gloomy, frosty days, the approaching spring sent as a forerunner a
clear, warm, sunny day, or but an hour, yet so full of spring, so
eagerly young and beaming that sparrows on the streets lost their wits
for joy, and people seemed almost as intoxicated. And now the strange
and beautiful sky could be seen through an upper window which was
dust-covered and unwashed since the last summer. At first sight the
sky seemed to be milky-gray-smoke-colored-but when you looked longer
the dark blue color began to penetrate through the shade, grew into an