"Where are you going to come from?" - he asked the priest who sat down next to him and looked at him from under his brow.

"Father" straightened the hem of his cassock, sat down more comfortably and, turning to face Father Pavel, began in a calm, even voice:

"I'm from afar... I am driving, so I admire Mother Volga. What grace you have here, what space. And life, how much life, is in full swing! How many people, how many goods of all kinds, what traffic: it is impossible to count how many passenger steamers alone. Yes, when you see everything with your own eyes, only then will you understand why our people called her Volgupoilitsa and nurse, why they love her so much, sing about her in their songs and are sad for her, thrown in a foreign direction. A great river indeed.

"Yes, we know," Father Pavel agreed. Born and raised on the banks of the Volga, Father Pavel loved his native river and, like a true Volga resident, was proud of it. The praise of the Volga of the stranger father pleased him. He had no trace of his former groundless annoyance at this father, and he began to listen to his words with greater eagerness.

"You have a lot of wealth here," the father continued, "but a lot of sorrow..." many tears and hopeless need. But this is not yet a great need. I happened to observe the life of a certain people on the outskirts of our fatherland. He lives much poorer than many of our peasants. He walks almost in rags, eats only barley or corn bread at home, and even then he is not full, and when you look at him, well done to man: everything is like a match. A slender gait and such a proud look, as if he was not wearing rags, but at least a general's uniform. You will think that he has neither sorrow nor worries, and no need is known to him. So, the trouble is not in poverty and not in sorrow. The trouble is that our Russian people do not know how to fight grief, with misfortune. If trouble comes upon him, he will either be forced to be patient with it, and then sometimes he will show a really iron patience, or he will rebel, also without any boundaries, and most often he only tries to get rid of his grief somehow, to extinguish it, to drown it out, to drown it out. Just like you. Grief befell you, and instead of fighting it, you became annoyed and drank... And you want to add another to one sorrow.

Father Pavel looked at the priest in surprise. "How does he know that I drink out of grief," flashed through his mind.

"And yet," the priest put his hand on Father Pavel's shoulder and jokingly tapped on him, "look at your power... such broad, heroic shoulders... And with such forces, not only your own grief, but also as much as someone else's can be carried...

Something cheerful smelled on Father Pavel. With pleasure he remembered how the peasants of his village, his parishioners, said about him that there was no worker against our father in the whole village.

"Here is another trait of the Russian character," the priest continued, as if thinking to himself, "grief befalls a person, and he rushes around with him and no longer wants to know anything, and does not think that another may have even greater grief. We love to cover our hearts with our sorrow, and we do not notice that by rushing with our grief, we add to the grief of others. Like you, for example.

"Who am I causing grief to?" Father Pavel asked in bewilderment.

- How, to whom? Here you are sitting and drinking, pouring out your grief, but you probably did not even think about that person... There's the gentleman who sits on the bench at the other end. Now we were passing the village, there was a church there. This gentleman took off his hat and piously crossed himself - it means that he still has faith in God in his heart. Well, now tell me, doesn't it hurt him to see a pastor of the church doing such an occupation?

Father Pavel squinted at the bottle of vodka standing in front of him, and the "father" rang the bell and ordered the waiter who came to the call to remove the bottle and the glass. Father Pavel did not protest and only, as if justifying himself, spoke:

"Why, I have a great resentment: I drink out of grief, that's right, father, you said.

"And you'd better tell me your grief, share it with me in a brotherly way, maybe it won't seem so heavy." The expressed grief is half a grief.