round!” added another. “He hasn’t looked round once, lads, he just runs off!”
“Did you expect him to come back to say thank you?” observed a third.
“Ah, to be sure it’s freedom. It’s freedom he sniffs.” “You can’t see him now, mates. . . .”
“What are you standing for? March!” shouted the guards, and we all trudged on to work in silence.
In beginning this chapter the editor of the late Alexandr Petrovitch Goryanchikov’s notes feels it his duty to make the following statement to the reader.
In the first chapter of “The House of the Dead,” some words were said about a parricide belonging to the upper class. Among other things he was quoted as an instance of the callousness with which the convicts will sometimes speak of their crimes. It was stated, too, that the murderer did not admit his guilt at his trial, but that judging by accounts given by people who knew all the details of his story, the facts were so clear that it was impossible to have any doubt of his guilt. These people told the author of the notes that the criminal was a man of reckless behaviour, that he had got into debt, and had killed his father because he coveted the fortune he would inherit from him. But all the people in the town where this parricide had lived told the story in the same way. Of this last fact the editor of these notes has fairly trustworthy information. Finally, it was stated in these notes that the criminal was always in the best of spirits in prison; that he was a whimsical, frivolous fellow, extremely lacking in common sense, though by no means a fool, that the author had never noticed in him any sign of cruelty. And the words are added: “Of course I did not believe in that crime.”
The other day the editor of the notes from “The House of the Dead” received information from Siberia that the criminal really was innocent, and had suffered ten years in penal servitude for nothing; that his innocence had been established before a court, officially, that the real criminals had been found and had
