t is so, is it not?"

I nodded.

"There!" the Lieutenant cried briskly as, cocking his hat, he assumed a
still more truculent air. Then, spreading out his hands, he growled in
his flexible bass:

"What is this cemetery? It is merely a place of show."

At this moment, for some reason or another, there occurred to me an
incident which involved the figure of Iraklei Virubov, the figure which
had carpet slippers on its ponderous feet, thick lips, a greedy mouth,
deceitful eyes, and a frame so huge and cavernous that the dapper
little Lieutenant could have stepped into it complete.

The day had been a Sunday, and the hour eventide. On the burnt plot of
ground some broken glass had been emitting a reddish gleam, shoots of
ergot had been diffusing their gloss, children shouting at play, dogs
trotting backwards and forwards, and all things, seemingly, faring
well, sunken in the stillness of the portion of the town adjoining the
rolling, vacant steppe, with, above them, only the sky's level,
dull-blue canopy, and around them, only the cemetery, like an island
amidst a sea.

With Virubov, I had been sitting on a bench near the wicket-gate of his
hut, as intermittently he had screwed his lecherous eyes in the
direction of the stout, ox-eyed lacemaker, Madame Ezhov, who, after
disposing of her form on a bank hard-by, had fallen to picking lice out
of the curls of her eight-year-old Petka Koshkodav. Presently, as
swiftly she had rummaged the boy's hair with fingers grown used to such
rapid movement, she had said to her husband (a dealer in second-hand
articles), who had been seated within doors, and therefore rendered
invisible--she had said with oily derision:

"Oh, yes, you bald-headed old devil, you! Of course you got your price.
Ye-es. Then, fool, you ought to have had a slipper smacked across that
Kalmuck snout of yours. Talk of my price, indeed!"

Upon this Virubov had remarked with a sigh, and in sluggish,
sententious tones:

"To grant the serfs emancipation was a sheer mistake. I am a humble
enough servant of my country, yet I can see the truth of what I have
stated, since it follows as a matter of course. What ought to have been
done is that all the estates of the landowners should have been
conveyed to the Tsar. Beyond a doubt that is so. Then both the
peasantry and the townsfolk, the whole people, in short, would have had
but a single landlord. For never can the people live properly so long
as it is ignorant o