Excellency's command, and went away. This late visit of the police
inspector and unexpected invitation to the Governor's had an
overwhelmingly oppressive effect upon me. From my earliest childhood
I have felt terror-stricken in the presence of gendarmes, policemen,
and law court officials, and now I was tormented by uneasiness, as
though I were really guilty in some way. And I could not get to
sleep. My nurse and Prokofy were also upset and could not sleep.
My nurse had earache too; she moaned, and several times began crying
with pain. Hearing that I was awake, Prokofy came into my room with
a lamp and sat down at the table.

"You ought to have a drink of pepper cordial," he said, after a
moment's thought. "If one does have a drink in this vale of tears
it does no harm. And if Mamma were to pour a little pepper cordial
in her ear it would do her a lot of good."

Between two and three he was going to the slaughter-house for the
meat. I knew I should not sleep till morning now, and to get through
the time till nine o'clock I went with him. We walked with a lantern,
while his boy Nikolka, aged thirteen, with blue patches on his
cheeks from frostbites, a regular young brigand to judge by his
expression, drove after us in the sledge, urging on the horse in a
husky voice.

"I suppose they will punish you at the Governor's," Prokofy said
to me on the way. "There are rules of the trade for governors, and
rules for the higher clergy, and rules for the officers, and rules
for the doctors, and every class has its rules. But you haven't
kept to your rules, and you can't be allowed."

The slaughter-house was behind the cemetery, and till then I had
only seen it in the distance. It consisted of three gloomy barns,
surrounded by a grey fence, and when the wind blew from that quarter
on hot days in summer, it brought a stifling stench from them. Now
going into the yard in the dark I did not see the barns; I kept
coming across horses and sledges, some empty, some loaded up with
meat. Men were walking about with lanterns, swearing in a disgusting
way. Prokofy and Nikolka swore just as revoltingly, and the air was
in a continual uproar with swearing, coughing, and the neighing of
horses.

There was a smell of dead bodies and of dung. It was thawing, the
snow was changing into mud; and in the darkness it seemed to me
that I was walking through pools of blood.

Having piled up the sledges full of meat we set off to the butcher's
sh