letic strength, hot blood, a soul
that never shrank. War would in any case have been a delight for
him:--and in his present state of mind!

Broken-hearted and crushed, his first love contemptuously trampling him
in the dust, his second murdered in the fervor of her passion, his soul
weighed with the load of melancholia, and that grievous fate which bore
down and overshadowed his family: always haunted by that terrible
foreboding that, sooner or later, he must still find his way to that
eighth resting-place, that empty niche.

When the wars began his lustreless spirit burst into brilliance. When he
put on his uniform, he came to me, and, grasping my hand, said with
flashing eyes:

"I am bargaining in the market where a man may barter his worn-out life
at a profit of a hundred per cent."

Yet he did not barter his.

Rumor talked of his boldness, people sang of his heroic deeds, he
received fame and wreaths, only he could not find what he sought: a
glorious death.

Of the regiment which he joined, in the end only a tenth part remained.
He was among those who were not even wounded.

Yet how many bullets had swept over his head!

How he looked for those whistling heralds of death, how he waited for
the approach of those whirring missiles to whom the transportation of a
man to another world in a moment is nothing! They knew him well already
and did not annoy him.

These buzzing bees of the battlefield, like the real bees, whir past the
ear of him who walks undaunted among them, and sting him who fears them.

Once a bullet pierced his helmet.

How often I heard him say:

"Why not an inch lower?"

Finally, in one battle a piece of an exploded shell maimed his arm, and
when he fell from his horse, disabled by a sword-cut, a Cossack pierced
him through with his lance.

Yet even that did not kill him.

For weeks he lay unconscious in the public hospital, under a tent, until
I came to fetch him home. Fanny nursed him. He recovered.

When he was better again, the war was over.

How many times I heard him say:

"What bad people you are, for loving me so! What a bad turn you did me,
when you brought me away from the scene of battle, brother! How
merciless you were Fanny, to watch beside me! What a vain task it was on
your part to keep me alive! How angry I am with you: what detestable
people you are!--just for loving me so!"

Yet we still loved him.

And then we grew old peacefully.

We buried kind grandmo