have been a village priest, a deacon . . . or simply a monk. . . .
All this oppresses me . . . oppresses me."

"What? Lord Jesus Christ. . . . That's the way. Come, sleep well,
your holiness! . . . What's the good of talking? It's no use.
Good-night!"

The bishop did not sleep all night. And at eight o'clock in the
morning he began to have hemorrhage from the bowels. The lay brother
was alarmed, and ran first to the archimandrite, then for the
monastery doctor, Ivan Andreyitch, who lived in the town. The doctor,
a stout old man with a long grey beard, made a prolonged examination
of the bishop, and kept shaking his head and frowning, then said:

"Do you know, your holiness, you have got typhoid?"

After an hour or so of hemorrhage the bishop looked much thinner,
paler, and wasted; his face looked wrinkled, his eyes looked bigger,
and he seemed older, shorter, and it seemed to him that he was
thinner, weaker, more insignificant than any one, that everything
that had been had retreated far, far away and would never go on
again or be repeated.

"How good," he thought, "how good!"

His old mother came. Seeing his wrinkled face and his big eyes, she
was frightened, she fell on her knees by the bed and began kissing
his face, his shoulders, his hands. And to her, too, it seemed that
he was thinner, weaker, and more insignificant than anyone, and now
she forgot that he was a bishop, and kissed him as though he were