"Thanks to your grace, our benefactor, we shall be ready soon for the road," said Mateush Bukoyemski. "What has happened is passed. Even saints have their failings; then how must it be with frail men, who without the grace of God can do nothing? But when I look at that moon, which forms the Turkish standard, my fist is stung as if mosquitoes were biting. Well, God grant a man to gratify his hands at the earliest."
The youngest Bukoyemski fell to thinking.
"Why is it, my reverend benefactor," asked he at last, "that Turks cherish some kind of worship for the moon, and bear it on their standards?"
"But have not dogs some devotion toward the moon also?" asked the priest.
"Of course, but why should the Turks have it?"
"Just because they are dog-brothers."
"Well, as God is dear to me, that explains all," said the young man, looking at the moon then in wonderment.
"But the moon is not to blame," said the host, "and it is delightful to gaze at it when in the calm of night it paints all the trees with its beams, as if some one had coated them with silver. I love greatly to sit by myself on such a night, gaze at the sky, and marvel at the Lord God's almightiness."
"Yes, at such times the soul flies on wings, as it were, to its Creator," said Father Voynovski. "God in his mercy created the moon as well as the sun, and what an immense benefaction. As to the sun, well, everything is visible in the daytime, but if there were no moon people would break their necks in the night if they travelled, not to mention this, that in perfect darkness devilish wickedness would be greater by far than it is at the present."
They were silent for a while and passed over the peaceful sky with their eyes; the priest took a pinch of snuff then, and added,--