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Talks With an Old Friend of God 205my pipe and thus far I have failed. So what kind of monk would Imake and how could I claim to have mastered my desires?’“I marveled at such a humility. And then, last summer on St.Peter’s day, I again found myself in that desert – God just willed itthat way – and when I walked into his cell, I saw it standing there,that thing, the microscope; he had ordered it from abroad andpaid a lot of money for it. ‘Wait, old man,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll showyou something very strange, something that you’ve never seenbefore. Here, see this drop of water that looks as pure as a tear?All right then, look at it now and you’ll see that scientists willsoon explain all the mysteries of God without leaving a singleone to you and me.’ That was just how he put it and it stuck in mymind. But it so happened that I’d already looked into a microscopethirty-five years before that, Mr. Malgasov’s microscope,my old master and Mr. Versilov’s maternal uncle, one of whoseestates he later inherited. Mr. Malgasov was a very importantgeneral and a big landowner, who kept a huge pack of hounds andwhose huntsman I was for many years. When he brought homethat microscope and installed it, Mr. Malgasov had all his serfsassembled – everybody, men and women – and ordered them tolook into it in turn; they were shown one after another a louse, aflea, the point of a needle, a hair, and a drop of water. And it wasvery funny – they were afraid to look into the thing, but they werealso afraid to incur Mr. Malgasov’s anger, for he was pretty shorttempered,our master. Some of the serfs didn’t know how to lookinto a microscope and they narrowed their eyes so much thatthey couldn’t make out anything; others were so scared that theycried out from fright, while old Savin Makarov put both handsover his eyes and shouted: ‘Do whatever you want to me, I won’tcome near it!’ And there was a lot of stupid laughing. But I didn’ttell Peter Valerianovich that I’d already had a glimpse into this