Before leaving Rykovsk, I wanted, if just for a minute, to gather my thoughts in private, and so, at dawn, I rushed to the nearby hill where the village cemetery was located.

Imaginarily bidding farewell to my dead friends, I took in the settlement's expanse one last time. Snow began falling on the valley below. It glistened above the higher mountains beneath the sun's amber rays. The bare ground around the peasant dwellings assumed a uniformly gray aspect. Amid them was the bright green of one of the church's cupolas. A light, hazy fog drifted over the river, producing a scene of nature's particular freshness during early spring.

“If you want to say goodbye to Sakhalin,” I told myself, “then say goodbye here. Down there, you’ll be doing a lot of talking, bustling about, loud embracing, crying… but it’ll all be interrupted and scattered and not profound and, most especially, directed at people.”

I walked slowly round several graves and recalled their sufferers’ unhappy lives. Grim scenes of the katorga island, on which I’d been a subject slave, arose before me…

“Protect me, God, from anything similar!” I exclaimed, interrupting my reverie, and with haste departed the hill for the settlement.

A bunch of penal laborers, exile-settlers, and beggars were already standing near my house. They’d all come to bid me farewell.

“Greetings!” the nearest old man, Evdokim Savelˊëv, an exact copy of Turgenev's Kasˊian from “Beautiful Swords,” said to me.

He covered his face with his hands and began crying. I myself was barely holding back tears and could not think how to placate him.

“I won't see you anymore!” he was saying, sobbing louder and louder.

“We’ll all see each other in the next world,” I began consoling the religious old man when, suddenly, a group of comrades-in-exile came out of my house to meet me.

So as to conceal my distress, I began anxiously asking whether they’d packed my things and all was ready to go.

My comrades expressed a desire to accompany me on foot while my travel companion K. dealt with the tarantass.

As we walked through the settlement, past houses and the church where Mass was commencing, exile-settlers whom I knew jogged over, each wanting to express a few heartfelt wishes for my journey.