One day in the village near Moscow where we used to spend our vacations before the First World War, the news spread that a hermit, a holy man, had come home from the wilderness in the far North to visit his family, which he had left to serve God. Together with all the others I ran to his hut. There, on a birch-wood stool in the little front yard, sat a grey-bearded man, who seemed age-old to me, although he probably really was not past the middle of his fifties. He looked completely unkempt, and wore a long, white shirt full of holes and loose threads; from his ascetic face, piercing eyes peered out of deep caverns. All this thoroughly corresponded to my view of a holy man. The ascetic said little. What he did say, I did not understand, but the peasants received it with awe. For a few days the hermit was the talk of the village, then people calmed down and got used to his presence.

But he hadn't been home a week when I was hauled from my bed early in the morning by a neighbor's boy. Something terrible and extremely interesting had happened. We ran to the holy man's hut. It was no longer standing, all one could see were smoking ruins from which the chimney still jutted up. The wife and daughter of the hermit were wailing and digging among the ashes. He himself was gone. From the people standing around the house I learned that the holy man had been on a binge last night, after which he had hit at everything his eyes fell on, whipped his wife and done something terrible to his daughter that I didn't understand. Afterwards he set fire to the house and made for the fields. On the same day it became known that after sleeping it off he had delivered himself to the police, and was immediately transported off to jail in Moscow.