having occurred amongst the lower classes, where the loans of
the mysterious usurer had brought misfortune in their train. One man,
previously a sober and honest artisan, had become a confirmed drunkard,
and died in the hospital; a shopman had robbed his master; an
izvoztchik, for years noted for his honesty, had cut the throat of a
customer in order to rob him of an insignificant sum. All these persons,
and many others, who sank into misery and crime, or perished by violent
deaths, had been customers of the mysterious Asiatic, of whom these
stories, related, as they often were, with additions and exaggerations,
inspired the quiet and peaceable inhabitants of the Kolomna with an
involuntary horror. Nobody doubted the real presence of the evil spirit
in this man. They said that he exacted conditions which made one's very
hair stand on end, and which none of his unhappy clients dared disclose;
that his money had a mysterious property of attraction; that the coins
were marked with strange characters, and grew red-hot of their own
accord. In short, there were a thousand extravagant reports. But what is
most remarkable is, that this population of Kolomna, made up of
pensioners, half-pay officers, petty functionaries, obscure artists, and
others equally necessitous, preferred bearing the utmost distress to
having recourse to the dreaded money-lender. They all declared they
would rather mortify their bodies than destroy their souls. Those who
met him in the street hurried by with an uneasy sensation, making way
for him with anxious submissiveness, and looking long over their
shoulders at the tall lean figure as it lost itself in the distance. His
singular frame might well have been the receptacle of a supernatural and
unholy spirit. The wild and deeply-cut features had something different
from humanity; the extraordinary thickness of the shaggy eyebrows; the
bronzed glow of the countenance; the frightful eyes, with their steady
unsupportable glare; even the broad folds of the Oriental dress were,
each in turn, the subject of uneasy and suspicious comment. My father
told me, that when he met him he could not avoid stopping to gaze at
him; and it invariably occurred to him that he had never seen, either in
painting or life, a face that so completely came up to his notion of a
demon. But I must make you, as briefly as possible, acquainted with my
father, who is the real hero of my tale. He was a remarkable man, a
self-taught paint