n. Afterwards,
when I had waded through some twenty volumes of the gigantic work
of Solovyoff--or Solovief, as the name is sometimes unphonetically
written--which is simply a vast collection of valuable but undigested
material, I was much less severe on the picturesque descriptions and
ornate style of his illustrious predecessor. The first work of fiction
which I read was a collection of tales by Grigorovitch, which had been
given to me by the author on my departure from St. Petersburg. These
tales, descriptive of rural life in Russia, had been written, as the
author afterwards admitted to me, under the influence of Dickens. Many
of the little tricks and affectations which became painfully obtrusive
in Dickens's later works I had no difficulty in recognising under their
Russian garb. In spite of these I found the book very pleasant reading,
and received from it some new notions--to be afterwards verified, of
course--about Russian peasant life.

One of these tales made a deep impression upon me, and I still remember
the chief incidents. The story opens with the description of a village
in late autumn. It has been raining for some time heavily, and the road
has become covered with a deep layer of black mud. An old woman--a small
proprietor--is sitting at home with a friend, drinking tea and trying to
read the future by means of a pack of cards. This occupation is suddenly
interrupted by the entrance of a female servant, who announces that
she has discovered an old man, apparently very ill, lying in one of the
outhouses. The old woman goes out to see her uninvited guest, and, being
of a kindly nature, prepares to have him removed to a more comfortable
place, and properly attended to; but her servant whispers to her that
perhaps he is a vagrant, and the generous impulse is thereby checked.
When it is discovered that the suspicion is only too well founded, and
that the man has no passport, the old woman becomes thoroughly alarmed.
Her imagination pictures to her the terrible consequences that would
ensue if the police should discover that she had harboured a vagrant.
All her little fortune might be extorted from her. And if the old man
should happen to die in her house or farmyard! The consequences in that
case might be very serious. Not only might she lose everything, but she
might even be dragged to prison. At the sight of these dangers the old
woman forgets her tender-heartedness, and becomes inexorable. The old
man, sick