“Come, don’t weep over me yet,” Father Zossima smiled, laying his right hand on his head.
“You see I am sitting up talking; maybe I shall live another twenty years yet, as that dear good woman from Vishegorye, with her little Lizaveta in her arms, wished me yesterday. God bless the mother and the little girl Lizaveta,” he crossed himself.
“Porfiry, did you take her offering where I told you?”
He meant the sixty copecks brought him the day before by the good-humored woman to be given “to someone poorer than me.” Such offerings, always of money gained by personal toil, are made by way of penance voluntarily undertaken. The elder had sent Porfiry the evening before to a widow, whose house had been burnt down lately, and who after the fire had gone with her children begging alms. Porfiry hastened to reply that he