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Tolstoi, addressing himself to Bacchus, declaimed another poem by Anacreon.

When Bacchus, Jove’s immortal boy,

The rosy harbinger of joy,

Who, with the sunshine of the bowl,

Thaws the winter of our soul;

When to my inmost core he glides,

And bathes it with his ruby tides,

A flow of joy, a lively heat,

Fires my brain, and wings my feet!

’Tis surely something sweet, I think,

Nay, something heavenly sweet, to drink!

Sing, sing of love, let music’s breath

Softly beguile our rapturous death,

While, my young Venus, thou and I

To the voluptuous cadence die!

Then waking from our languid trance,

Again we’ll sport, again we’ll dance.

“It’s plain from the verses,” remarked Peter, “that Anacreon was a lordly drunkard and took life mighty easily.”

After the customary toasts for the welfare of the fleet, the Tsar and the Tsaritsa, the Archimandrite Theodosius Janovski stood up with solemn air, glass in hand. Notwithstanding the Polish expression of self-esteem on his face—he belonged to the minor Polish nobility—notwithstanding the blue decoration ribbon, and the diamond panagia with the Emperor’s likeness on one side and the crucifix on the other, with the diamonds more in number and larger on the former than the latter, notwithstanding all this, Theodosius, to quote Avrámoff’s account, “had the appearance of some monstrosity,” of a starveling or an abortion. He was small, thin and angular; in his tall mitre with its long folds of black crêpe, his very wide pall with wide open sleeves, he greatly resembled a bat. Yet when he joked and especially when he scoffed at sacred things, which usually happened when he was drunk, his sly eyes would sparkle with such wit, such impudent mirth, that the miserable face of the bat-like abortion became almost attractive.