Two days after Mitya's sentence, Alyosha arrives late to Ilusha's funeral. About twelve schoolboys have waited for him, remembering Ilusha's dying words: Father will cry, be with father. Kolya greets him and says Snegiryov looks drunk though he has not touched drink. Before the procession Kolya asks whether Mitya or the valet killed their father; Alyosha answers the valet did it and his brother is innocent. Inside, the captain will not give Ilusha's flowers to his wife and insists the boy must be buried by the stone where the boys once stoned him.
The same boys who once stoned Ilusha now carry his flower-decked coffin past his mother, who beats her breast without speaking. Alyosha asks the landlady to stay with the family; she weeps and says they are Christians too. At the grave Katya paid for, Snegiryov fusses over a fallen flower, then remembers the crust of bread Ilusha asked him to crumble for sparrows and mutters Come, fly down, birds. After the burial he nearly falls into the grave. Running home ahead of everyone, he cries that the flowers are for mamma and that he was unkind to her, flings his hat in the snow, and at the door kisses Ilusha's old boots, asking where his little feet have gone.
At Ilusha's stone Alyosha tells the boys he will soon leave town: one brother goes to Siberia, another lies near death. He asks a compact never to forget Ilusha and one another, even if they do not meet for twenty years. He calls them his little doves and says there is nothing higher or stronger for life ahead than some good memory, especially of childhood, which may save a man even if he grows wicked later. He urges them to remember how they loved the poor boy and became better for a time.
The boys cry that they will remember forever. Kolya wonders why sorrow ends in pancakes; Alyosha says life is good when one does something just. They shout Hurrah for Karamazov, walk hand in hand to the funeral dinner, and the novel ends.
