ed him through the garden where the cabbages raised their dry
heads, he could not formulate a single thought.

He was conducted to the road and placed at the railing with his back
to one of the iron bars. He fixed his spectacles, put his hands behind
him, and stood there with his neat, stocky body, his head slightly
inclined to one side.

At the last moment he looked in front of him and saw rifle barrels
pointing at his head, chest and stomach, and pale faces with trembling
lips. He distinctly saw how one barrel levelled at his forehead
suddenly dropped.

Something strange and incomprehensible, as if no longer of this world,
no longer earthly, passed through Andersen's mind. He straightened
himself to the full height of his short body and threw back his head
in simple pride. A strange indistinct sense of cleanness, strength and
pride filled his soul, and everything--the sun and the sky and the
people and the field and death--seemed to him insignificant, remote
and useless.

The bullets hit him in the chest, in the left eye, in the stomach,
went through his clean coat buttoned all the way up. His glasses
shivered into bits. He uttered a shriek, circled round, and fell with
his face against one of the iron bars, his one remaining eye wide
open. He clawed the ground with his outstretched hands as if trying to
support himself.

The officer, who had turned green, rushed toward him, and senselessly
thrust the revolver against his neck, and fired twice. Andersen
stretched out on the ground.

The soldiers left quickly. But Andersen remained pressed flat to the
ground. The index finger of his left hand continued to quiver for
about ten seconds.

THE OUTRAGE--A TRUE STORY

BY ALEKSANDR I. KUPRIN

It was five o'clock on a July afternoon. The heat was terrible. The
whole of the huge stone-built town breathed out heat like a glowing
furnace. The glare of the white-walled house was insufferable. The
asphalt pavements grew soft and burned the feet. The shadows of the
acacias spread over the cobbled road, pitiful and weary. They too
seemed hot. The sea, pale in the sunlight, lay heavy and immobile as
one dead. Over the streets hung a white dust.

In the foyer of one of the private theatres a small committee of local
barristers who had undertaken to conduct the cases of those who had
suffered in the last pogrom against the Jews was reaching the end of
its daily task. There were nineteen of them, all juniors, yo