stood staring, with their dim, humble eyes of windows, at the crumbling
bricks of the cemetery wall, and the dense mass of trees which that
wall enclosed. Here, in one such hut, had I myself a lodging in a
diminutive attic, which not only smelt of lamp-oil, but stood in a
position to have wafted to it the least gasp or ejaculation on the part
of my landlord, Iraklei Virubov, a clerk in the local treasury. In
short, I could never glance out of the window at the cemetery on the
other side of the strip of dead, burnt, polluted earth without
reflecting that, by comparison, that cemetery was a place of sheer
beauty, a place of ceaseless attraction.

And ever, that day, as though he had been following me, could there be
sighted among the tombs the dark figure of the old man who had so
abruptly awakened me from slumber; and since his straw hat reflected
the sunlight as brilliantly as the disk of a sunflower as it meandered
hither and thither, I, in my turn, found myself following him, though
thinking, all the while, of Iraklei Virubov. Only a week was it since
Iraklei's wife, a thin, shrewish, long-nosed woman with green and
catlike eyes, had set forth on a pilgrimage to Kiev, and Iraklei had
hastened to import into the hut a stout, squint-eyed damsel whom he had
introduced to me as his "niece by marriage."

"She was baptised Evdokia," he had said on the occasion referred to.
"Usually, however, I call her Dikanka. Pray be friendly with her, but
remember, also, that she is not a person with whom to take liberties."

Large, round-shouldered, and clean-shaven like a chef, Virubov was for
ever hitching up breeches which had slipped from a stomach ruined with
surfeits of watermelon. And always were his fat lips parted as though
athirst, and perpetually had he in his colourless eyes an expression of
insatiable hunger.

One evening I overheard a dialogue to the following effect.

"Dikanka, pray come and scratch my back. Yes, between the
shoulder-blades. O-o-oh, that is it. My word, how strong you are!"

Whereat Dikanka had laughed shrilly. And only when I had moved my
chair, and thrown down my book, had the laughter and unctuous
whispering died away, and given place to a whisper of:

"Holy Father Nicholas, pray for us unto God! Is the supper kvas ready,
Dikanka?"

And softly the pair had departed to the kitchen--there to grunt and
squeal once more like a couple of pigs....

The old man with the grey moustache stepped over