“Perhaps so,” returned Petroff, with a somewhat perplexed look, “but he said nothing about that. His chief desire seemed to be to get us to listen to what he read out of his Bible. And some of us did listen, too. He gave one of the Bibles to my wife here, and she has been reading it pretty eagerly ever since.”
“What! this, then, is your wife?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, Marika is my wife, and Ivanka is my daughter,” replied Petroff, with a tender glance at the little girl that trotted by his side.
“Perhaps, Marika, your Cornish friend may have taught you to speak English,” said I, in my native tongue, turning to the woman.
Marika shook her pretty head, laughed, and blushed. She seemed to understand me, but would not consent to reply in English.
“The colporteur of whom you have spoken,” said I, turning to the blacksmith, and again speaking Russian, “did you a great service when he gave your wife the Word of God.”
Dobri Petroff assented, but a frown for a minute overspread his face. “Yes,” he said, “I admit that, but he also taught me to think, and it might have been better for me—for many of us in this land—if we did not think; if we could eat and sleep and work like the brutes that perish.”
I feared that I knew too well what the man referred to, and would gladly have dropped the subject, but could not do so without appearing rude.
“It is always well to think,” said I, “when we think rightly, that is, in accordance with the teachings of the Bible, about which we have just been speaking. Marika has read much of it to you, no doubt?”
“She has,” said the blacksmith, with a touch of sternness, “and among other things, she has read to me that ‘oppression driveth even a wise man mad.’ Am I to understand that as merely stating the fact, or justifying the madness?”