They’re beyond reckoning.” He glanced at me and laughed, but so good-naturedly that I could not help smiling in response. “Do you know, Alexandr Petrovitch, that whenever I dream at night now, I always dream that I am being beaten? I never have any other dreams.” He certainly often cried out at night and so loudly that the other convicts waked him up at once by prodding him, and saying, “What are you shouting for, you devil!” He was a short sturdy fellow of forty-five, good-humoured and restless; he got on well with everyone and though he was very fond of stealing, and often got a beating among us for that, after all everyone stole and everyone was beaten for it.

I will add one other point. I was always amazed at the extraordinary good nature, the absence of vindictiveness, with which all these victims talked of how they had been beaten, and of the men who had beaten them. Often there was not the slightest trace of spite or hatred in their story, which gripped my heart at once, and made it throb violently. Yet they would tell the story and laugh like children.