ssed
his hand to my mother, who was crying, and all at once his eye was
caught by me. A look of the utmost astonishment came into his face.

"What boy is this?" he asked.

My mother, who had declared my uncle's coming was a piece of luck for
which I must thank God, was bitterly mortified at this question. I was
in no mood for questions. I looked at my uncle's happy face, and for
some reason I felt fearfully sorry for him. I could not resist jumping
up to the carriage and hugging that frivolous man, weak as all men are.
Looking into his face and wanting to say something pleasant, I asked:

"Uncle, have you ever been in a battle?"

"Ah, the dear boy..." laughed my uncle, kissing me. "A charming boy,
upon my soul! How natural, how living it all is, upon my soul!..."

The carriage set off.... I looked after him, and long afterwards that
farewell "upon my soul" was ringing in my ears.

THE MAN IN A CASE

AT the furthest end of the village of Mironositskoe some belated
sportsmen lodged for the night in the elder Prokofy's barn. There were
two of them, the veterinary surgeon Ivan Ivanovitch and the schoolmaster
Burkin. Ivan Ivanovitch had a rather strange double-barrelled
surname--Tchimsha-Himalaisky--which did not suit him at all, and he
was called simply Ivan Ivanovitch all over the province. He lived at a
stud-farm near the town, and had come out shooting now to get a breath
of fresh air. Burkin, the high-school teacher, stayed every summer at
Count P-----'s, and had been thoroughly at home in this district for
years.

They did not sleep. Ivan Ivanovitch, a tall, lean old fellow with
long moustaches, was sitting outside the door, smoking a pipe in the
moonlight. Burkin was lying within on the hay, and could not be seen in
the darkness.

They were telling each other all sorts of stories. Among other things,
they spoke of the fact that the elder's wife, Mavra, a healthy and by no
means stupid woman, had never been beyond her native village, had never
seen a town nor a railway in her life, and had spent the last ten years
sitting behind the stove, and only at night going out into the street.

"What is there wonderful in that!" said Burkin. "There are plenty of
people in the world, solitary by temperament, who try to retreat into
their shell like a hermit crab or a snail. Perhaps it is an instance of
atavism, a return to the period when the ancestor of man was not yet a
social animal and lived alone in his d