or him."

Did Akaky Akakiyevich hear these fatal words? And if he heard them,
did they produce any overwhelming effect upon him? Did he lament the
bitterness of his life?--We know not, for he continued in a delirious
condition. Visions incessantly appeared to him, each stranger than the
other. Now he saw Petrovich, and ordered him to make a cloak, with
some traps for robbers, who seemed to him to be always under the bed;
and he cried every moment to the landlady to pull one of them from
under his coverlet. Then he inquired why his old mantle hung before
him when he had a new cloak. Next he fancied that he was standing
before the prominent person, listening to a thorough setting-down and
saying, "Forgive me, your excellency!" but at last he began to curse,
uttering the most horrible words, so that his aged landlady crossed
herself, never in her life having heard anything of the kind from him,
and more so as these words followed directly after the words "your
excellency." Later on he talked utter nonsense, of which nothing could
be made, all that was evident being that these incoherent words and
thoughts hovered ever about one thing, his cloak.

At length poor Akaky Akakiyevich breathed his last. They sealed up
neither his room nor his effects, because, in the first place, there
were no heirs, and, in the second, there was very little to inherit
beyond a bundle of goose-quills, a quire of white official paper,
three pairs of socks, two or three buttons which had burst off his
trousers, and the mantle already known to the reader. To whom all this
fell, God knows. I confess that the person who told me this tale took
no interest in the matter. They carried Akaky Akakiyevich out, and
buried him.

And St. Petersburg was left without Akaky Akakiyevich, as though he
had never lived there. A being disappeared, who was protected by none,
dear to none, interesting to none, and who never even attracted to
himself the attention of those students of human nature who omit no
opportunity of thrusting a pin through a common fly and examining it
under the microscope. A being who bore meekly the jibes of the
department, and went to his grave without having done one unusual
deed, but to whom, nevertheless, at the close of his life, appeared a
bright visitant in the form of a cloak, which momentarily cheered his
poor life, and upon him, thereafter, an intolerable misfortune
descended, just as it descends upon the heads of the mighty of th