The peasants have gathered in their harvest, and can give of their abundance.
There are merry-makings and marriages, besides the ordinary deaths and baptisms.

Altogether I shall lose by the thing more than a hundred roubles!" I confess I was a little shocked on hearing the priest thus speak of his sacred functions as if they were an ordinary marketable commodity, and talk of the inhibition as a pushing undertaker might talk of sanitary improvements.

My surprise was caused not by the fact that he regarded the matter from a pecuniary point of view--for I was old enough to know that clerical human nature is not altogether insensible to pecuniary considerations--but by the fact that he should thus undisguisedly express his opinions to a stranger without in the least suspecting that there was anything unseemly in his way of speaking.

The incident appeared to me very characteristic, but I refrained from all audible comments, lest I should inadvertently check his communicativeness.

With the view of encouraging it, I professed to be very much interested, as I really was, in what he said, and I asked him how in his opinion the present unsatisfactory state of things might be remedied.
"There is but one cure," he said, with a readiness that showed he had often spoken on the theme already, "and that is freedom and publicity.
We full-grown men are treated like children, and watched like conspirators.