head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before
his eyes. Andrey Yefimitch understood that his end had come, and
remembered that Ivan Dmitritch, Mihail Averyanitch, and millions
of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed?
But he did not want immortality--and he thought of it only for
one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful,
of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a
peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter
. . . . Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and
Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion for ever.

The hospital porters came, took him by his arms and legs, and carried
him away to the chapel.

There he lay on the table, with open eyes, and the moon shed its
light upon him at night. In the morning Sergey Sergeyitch came,
prayed piously before the crucifix, and closed his former chief's
eyes.

Next day Andrey Yefimitch was buried. Mihail Averyanitch and Daryushka
were the only people at the funeral.

THE PETCHENYEG

IVAN ABRAMITCH ZHMUHIN, a retired Cossack officer, who had once
served in the Caucasus, but now lived on his own farm, and who had
once been young, strong, and vigorous, but now was old, dried up,
and bent, with shaggy eyebrows and a greenish-grey moustache, was
returning from the town to his farm one hot summer's day. In the
town he had confessed and received absolution, and had made his
will at the notary's (a fortnight before he had had a slight stroke),
and now all the while he was in the railway carriage he was haunted
by melancholy, serious thoughts of approaching death, of the vanity
of vanities, of the transitoriness of all things earthly. At the
station of Provalye--there is such a one on the Donetz line--a
fair-haired, plump, middle-aged gentleman with a shabby portfolio
stepped into the carriage and sat down opposite. They got into
conversation.

"Yes," said Ivan Abramitch, looking pensively out of window, "it
is never too late to marry. I myself married when I was forty-eight;
I was told it was late, but it has turned out that it was not late
or early, but simply that it would have been better not to marry
at all. Everyone is soon tired of his wife, but not everyone tells
the truth, because, you know, people are ashamed of an unhappy home
life and conceal it. It's 'Manya this' and 'Manya that' with many
a man by his wife's side, but if he had his way he