pective, partially closed eyes from a
mouth that was set half-open. Indeed, it was as though the man were
pondering something of annoyance, so that presently he would make shift
to deliver himself of a final and urgent injunction. The blue smoke of
a meagre candle quivered meanwhile, over his head, though the wick
diffused so feeble a light that the death blurs under the eyes and in
the cheek furrows lay uneffaced, and the dark hands and wrists,
disposed, lumplike, on the front of the greyish-blue shroud, seemed to
have had their fingers twisted in a manner which even death had failed
to rectify. And ever and anon, streaming from door to window, came a
draught variously fraught with the odours of wormwood, mint, and
corruption.

Presently the old woman's whispering grew more animated and
intelligible, while constantly, amid the wheezed mutterings, sheet
lightning cut the black square of the window space with menacing
flashes, and seemed, with their blue glare, as it shot through the
tomblike hut, to cause the candle's flickering flame to undergo a
temporary extinction, a temporary withdrawal, and the grey bristles on
the dead man's face to gleam like the scales of a fish, and his
features to gather themselves into a grim frown. Meanwhile, like a
stream of cold, bitter water dripping upon my breast, the old woman's
whispered soliloquy maintained its uninterrupted flow.

At length there recurred, somehow, to my mind the words which,
impressive though they be, never can assuage sorrow--the words:

"Weep not for me, Martha, nor gaze into the tomb, for, lo, I am risen!"

Nay, and never would THIS man rise again....

Presently the bony old woman returned with a report that nowhere among
the huts could a Psalter be found, but only a book of another kind.
Would it do?

The other book turned out to be a grammar of the Church Slavonic
dialect, with the first pages torn out, and beginning with the words,
"Drug, drugi, druzhe." ["A friend, of a friend, O friend."]

"What, then, are we to do?" vexedly asked the smaller of the dames when
I had explained to her that a grammar could work no benefit to a
corpse. As she put the query, her small, childlike face quivered with
disappointment, and her eyes swelled and overflowed with tears.

"My man has lived his life," she said with a sob, "and now he cannot
even be given proper burial!"

And, similarly, when next I offered to recite over her husband each and
every prayer and psa