urther, Zotov remembers that in his drunken
foolishness, seeing the two corpses, he went up to the stand, and
put his own forehead ready for a blow.

And all that day his eyes were dimmed by a haze, and he could not
even see his own fingers.

WHO WAS TO BLAME?

As my uncle Pyotr Demyanitch, a lean, bilious collegiate councillor,
exceedingly like a stale smoked fish with a stick through it, was
getting ready to go to the high school, where he taught Latin, he
noticed that the corner of his grammar was nibbled by mice.

"I say, Praskovya," he said, going into the kitchen and addressing
the cook, "how is it we have got mice here? Upon my word! yesterday
my top hat was nibbled, to-day they have disfigured my Latin grammar
. . . . At this rate they will soon begin eating my clothes!

"What can I do? I did not bring them in!" answered Praskovya.

"We must do something! You had better get a cat, hadn't you?"

"I've got a cat, but what good is it?"

And Praskovya pointed to the corner where a white kitten, thin as
a match, lay curled up asleep beside a broom.

"Why is it no good?" asked Pyotr Demyanitch.

"It's young yet, and foolish. It's not two months old yet."

"H'm. . . . Then it must be trained. It had much better be learning
instead of lying there."

Saying this, Pyotr Demyanitch sighed with a careworn air and went
out of the kitchen. The kitten raised his head, looked lazily after
him, and shut his eyes again.

The kitten lay awake thinking. Of what? Unacquainted with real life,
having no store of accumulated impressions, his mental processes
could only be instinctive, and he could but picture life in accordance
with the conceptions that he had inherited, together with his flesh
and blood, from his ancestors, the tigers (_vide_ Darwin). His
thoughts were of the nature of day-dreams. His feline imagination
pictured something like the Arabian desert, over which flitted
shadows closely resembling Praskovya, the stove, the broom. In the
midst of the shadows there suddenly appeared a saucer of milk; the
saucer began to grow paws, it began moving and displayed a tendency
to run; the kitten made a bound, and with a thrill of blood-thirsty
sensuality thrust his claws into it.

When the saucer had vanished into obscurity a piece of meat appeared,
dropped by Praskovya; the meat ran away with a cowardly squeak, but
the kitten made a bound and got his claws into it. . . . Everything
that rose before the imaginat