ith rusty,
hoarse voices were roaring out some incoherent song. "They must be
hurrying to a funeral procession; or, perhaps, have even finished it
already," reflected Lichonin; "merry fellows!" On the boulevard he came
to a stop and sat down on a small wooden bench, painted green. Two rows
of mighty centenarian chestnuts went away into the distance, merging
together somewhere afar into one straight green arrow. The prickly
large nuts were already hanging on the trees. Lichonin suddenly
recalled that at the very beginning of the spring he had been sitting
on this very boulevard, and at this very same spot. Then it had been a
calm, gentle evening of smoky purple, soundlessly falling into slumber,
just like a smiling, tired maiden. Then the stalwart chestnuts, with
their foliage--broad at the bottom and narrow toward the top--had been
strewn all over with clusters of blossoms, growing with bright, rosy,
thin cones straight to the sky; just as though some one by mistake had
taken and fastened upon all the chestnuts, as upon lustres, pink
Christmas-tree candles. And suddenly, with extraordinary
poignancy--every man sooner or later passes through this zone of inner
emotion--Lichonin felt, that here are the nuts ripening already, while
then there had been little pink blossoming candles, and that there
would be many more springs and many blossoms, but the one which had
passed no one and nothing had the power to bring back. Sadly gazing
into the depths of the retreating dense alley, he suddenly noticed that
sentimental tears were making his eyes smart.

He got up and went on farther, looking closely at everything that he
met with an incessant, sharpened, and at the same time calm attention,
just as though he were looking at the God-created world for the first
time. A gang of stone masons went past him on the pavement, and all of
them were reflected in his inner vision with an exaggerated vividness
and brilliance of colour, just as though on the frosted glass of a
camera obscura. The foreman, with a red beard, matted to one side, and
with blue austere eyes; and a tremendous young fellow, whose left eye
was swollen, and who had a spot of a dark-blue colour spreading from
the forehead to the cheekbone and from the nose to the temple; and a
young boy with a naive, country face, with a gaping mouth like a
fledgling's, weak, moist; and an old man who, having come late, was
running after the gang at a funny, goat-like trot; and their c