ig soft snowflakes were whirling restlessly over the
earth, unable to find a resting-place. The horses, the sledge, the
trees, a bull tied to a post, all were white and seemed soft and
fluffy.

"Well, God help you," muttered Liharev, tucking her into the sledge.
"Don't remember evil against me . . . ."

She was silent. When the sledge started, and had to go round a huge
snowdrift, she looked back at Liharev with an expression as though
she wanted to say something to him. He ran up to her, but she did
not say a word to him, she only looked at him through her long
eyelashes with little specks of snow on them.

Whether his finely intuitive soul were really able to read that
look, or whether his imagination deceived him, it suddenly began
to seem to him that with another touch or two that girl would have
forgiven him his failures, his age, his desolate position, and would
have followed him without question or reasonings. He stood a long
while as though rooted to the spot, gazing at the tracks left by
the sledge runners. The snowflakes greedily settled on his hair,
his beard, his shoulders. . . . Soon the track of the runners had
vanished, and he himself covered with snow, began to look like a
white rock, but still his eyes kept seeking something in the clouds
of snow.

ROTHSCHILD'S FIDDLE

THE town was a little one, worse than a village, and it was inhabited
by scarcely any but old people who died with an infrequency that
was really annoying. In the hospital and in the prison fortress
very few coffins were needed. In fact business was bad. If Yakov
Ivanov had been an undertaker in the chief town of the province he
would certainly have had a house of his own, and people would have
addressed him as Yakov Matveyitch; here in this wretched little
town people called him simply Yakov; his nickname in the street was
for some reason Bronze, and he lived in a poor way like a humble
peasant, in a little old hut in which there was only one room, and
in this room he and Marfa, the stove, a double bed, the coffins,
his bench, and all their belongings were crowded together.

Yakov made good, solid coffins. For peasants and working people he
made them to fit himself, and this was never unsuccessful, for there
were none taller and stronger than he, even in the prison, though
he was seventy. For gentry and for women he made them to measure,
and used an iron foot-rule for the purpose. He was very unwilling
to take orders for child