not be created here."

"What is all this?" Nadezhda put in with a stamp of her foot. "What--"

At this point, the cook rushed out with a toasting-fork and militantly
ranged herself by Nadezhda's side, exclaiming:

"See what comes of not having a single muzhik in the house!"

I now prepared to withdraw, but, in doing so, glanced once more at the
features of the elderly lady, and saw that the blue pupils were dilated
so as almost to fill the eyes in their entirety, and to leave only a
bluish margin. And strange and painful were those eyes--eyes fixed
blindly, eyes which seemed to have strayed from their orbits through
yielding to emotion and a consequent overstrain--while the apple of the
throat had swelled like the crop of a bird, and the sheen of the silken
head-dress become as the sheen of metal. Involuntarily, I thought to
myself:

"It is a head that must be made of iron."

By this time Gubin had penitently subsided, and was exchanging harmless
remarks with the cook, while carefully avoiding my glance.

"Good day to you, madame," at length I said as I passed the window.

Not at once did she reply, but when she did so she said kindly:

"And good day to YOU, my friend. Yes, I wish you good day."

To which she added an inclination of the head which resembled nothing
so much as a hammer which much percussion upon an anvil has wrought to
a fine polish.

NILUSHKA

The timber-built town of Buev, a town which has several times been
burnt to the ground, lies huddled upon a hillock above the river
Obericha. Its houses, with their many-coloured shutters, stand so
crowded together as to form around the churches and gloomy law courts a
perfect maze--the streets which intersect the dark masses of houses
meandering aimlessly hither and thither, and throwing off alleyways as
narrow as sleeves, and feeling their way along plot-fences and
warehouse walls, until, viewed from the hillock above, the town looks
as though someone has stirred it up with a stick and dispersed and
confused everything that it contains. Only from the point where Great
Zhitnaia Street takes its rise from the river do the stone mansions of
the local merchants (for the most part German colonists) cut a grim,
direct line through the packed clusters of buildings constructed of
wood, and skirt the green islands of gardens, and thrust aside the
churches; whereafter, continuing its way through Council Square (still
running inexorably straight), the