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146 stopped with moss. I am sure their minds were blank, unless they were thinking of bread and brandy. But after a while, one of the peasants came up to the wall and began to bore a hole in it. He drilled the log through, and slowly, cautiously, and unctuously unscrewed the drill backward.

This done, together with the others he fell on his knees and yelled with a heart-rending voice:

"O, hole of ours, O, sacred hole! Help us!"

And for hours they kept imploring the hole in the log.

Who was it that invented this simplest of all gods—a hole? Who was the founder^, the prophet of this savage, idiotic sect, terrible in its madness and darkness?

No one has ever inquired into this question, but now, after many years have passed away, it seems to me that perhaps I am on the track of the solution of this riddle.

For in the northern territories of Russia the wintry night lasts for months. The sun disappears, everything becomes cold, hopeless, sick with an unknown yearning in the dark cottages with windows filled in with thick bladder instead of glass, covered with a sheet of ice, and snowed over as high as the thatched roof. Through a hole drilled in the wall a streak of moonlight enters; not even a beam of light, but perhaps only the faintly perceptible glimmer of its shine