her who was lying on the sofa in the parlour,
and asked her to go into the bedroom: the bishop had just breathed
his last.

Next day was Easter Sunday. There were forty-two churches and six
monasteries in the town; the sonorous, joyful clang of the bells
hung over the town from morning till night unceasingly, setting the
spring air aquiver; the birds were singing, the sun was shining
brightly. The big market square was noisy, swings were going, barrel
organs were playing, accordions were squeaking, drunken voices were
shouting. After midday people began driving up and down the principal
street.

In short, all was merriment, everything was satisfactory, just as
it had been the year before, and as it will be in all likelihood
next year.

A month later a new suffragan bishop was appointed, and no one
thought anything more of Bishop Pyotr, and afterwards he was
completely forgotten. And only the dead man's old mother, who is
living to-day with her son-in-law the deacon in a remote little
district town, when she goes out at night to bring her cow in and
meets other women at the pasture, begins talking of her children
and her grandchildren, and says that she had a son a bishop, and
this she says timidly, afraid that she may not be believed. . . .

And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her.

THE LETTER

The clerical superintendent of the district, his Reverence Father
Fyodor Orlov, a handsome, well-nourished man of fifty, grave and
important as he always was, with an habitual expression of dignity
that never left his face, was walking to and fro in his little
drawing-room, extremely exhausted, and thinking intensely about the
same thing: "When would his visitor go?" The thought worried him
and did not leave him for a minute. The visitor, Father Anastasy,
the priest of one of the villages near the town, had come to him
three hours before on some very unpleasant and dreary business of
his own, had stayed on and on, was now sitting in the corner at a
little round table with his elbow on a thick account book, and
apparently had no thought of going, though it was getting on for
nine o'clock in the evening.

Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not
infrequently happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly
breeding fail to observe that their presence is arousing a feeling
akin to hatred in their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling
is being concealed with an effort and disguis