compared with the strained suspense with which spiritualists wait
from minute to minute the appearance of a ghost. Mother went about
with a sick headache, and was continually melting into tears. I lost my
appetite, slept badly, and did not learn my lessons. Even in my dreams
I was haunted by an impatient longing to see a general--that is, a man
with epaulettes and an embroidered collar sticking up to his ears, and
with a naked sword in his hands, exactly like the one who hung over
the sofa in the drawing-room and glared with terrible black eyes at
everybody who dared to look at him. Pobyedimsky was the only one who
felt himself in his element. He was neither terrified nor delighted,
and merely from time to time, when he heard the history of the Gundasov
family, said:

"Yes, it will be pleasant to have some one fresh to talk to."

My tutor was looked upon among us as an exceptional nature. He was a
young man of twenty, with a pimply face, shaggy locks, a low forehead,
and an unusually long nose. His nose was so big that when he wanted to
look close at anything he had to put his head on one side like a bird.
To our thinking, there was not a man in the province cleverer, more
cultivated, or more stylish. He had left the high-school in the class
next to the top, and had then entered a veterinary college, from which
he was expelled before the end of the first half-year. The reason of his
expulsion he carefully concealed, which enabled any one who wished to
do so to look upon my instructor as an injured and to some extent a
mysterious person. He spoke little, and only of intellectual subjects;
he ate meat during the fasts, and looked with contempt and condescension
on the life going on around him, which did not prevent him, however,
from taking presents, such as suits of clothes, from my mother, and
drawing funny faces with red teeth on my kites. Mother disliked him for
his "pride," but stood in awe of his cleverness.

Our visitor did not keep us long waiting. At the beginning of May two
wagon-loads of big boxes arrived from the station. These boxes looked
so majestic that the drivers instinctively took off their hats as they
lifted them down.

"There must be uniforms and gunpowder in those boxes," I thought.

Why "gunpowder"? Probably the conception of a general was closely
connected in my mind with cannons and gunpowder.

When I woke up on the morning of the tenth of May, nurse told me in a
whisper that "my uncle had