th
deliberation, and entire assurance, and yielded the path to no one whom
she might encounter. I have an idea that there lay buried there a son
who had been killed in a roisterers' brawl.

Another habitual visitor was thin-legged, short-sighted Aulic
Councillor Praotzev, ex-schoolmaster. With a book stuffed into the
pocket of his canvas pea-jacket, a white umbrella grasped in his red
hand, and a smile extending to ears as sharp and pointed as a rabbit's,
he could, any Sunday after dinner, be seen skipping from tomb to tomb,
with his umbrella brandished like a white flag soliciting terms of
peace with death.

And, on returning home before the bell rang for Vespers, he would find
that a crowd of boys had collected outside his garden wall; whereupon,
dancing about him like puppies around a stork, they would fall to
shouting in various merry keys:

"The Councillor, the Councillor! Who was it that fell in love with
Madame Sukhinikh, and then fell into the pond?"

Losing his temper, and opening a great mouth, until he looked like an
old rook which is about to caw, the Councillor would stamp his foot
several times, as though preparing to dance to the boys' shouting, and
lower his head, grasp his umbrella like a bayonet, and charge at the
lads with a panting shout of:

"I'll tell your fathers! Oh, I'll tell your mothers!"

As for the Madame Sukhinikh, referred to, she was an old beggar-woman
who, the year round, and in all weathers, sat on a little bench beside
the cemetery wicket, and stuck to it like a stone. Her large face, a
face rendered bricklike by years of inebriety, was covered with dark
blotches born of frostbite, alcoholic inflammation, sunburn, and
exposure to wind, and her eyes were perpetually in a state of
suppuration. Never did anyone pass her but she proffered a wooden cup
in a suppliant hand, and cried hoarsely, rather as though she were
cursing the person concerned:

"Give something for Christ's sake! Give in memory of your kinsfolk
there!"

Once an unexpected storm blew in from the steppes, and brought a
downpour which, overtaking the old woman on her way home, caused her,
her sight being poor, to fall into a pond, whence Praotzev attempted to
rescue her, and into which, in the end, he slipped himself. From that
day onwards he was twitted on the subject by the boys of the town.

Other frequenters of the cemetery I see before me--dark, silent
figures, figures of persons whom still unsevered cords