Yes . . ." the sacristan admitted, and was overcome with confusion.
"When we come with the Cross, your Excellency, to grand gentlemen's
houses I always sign my name. . . . I like doing it. . . . Excuse
me, but when I see the list of names in the hall I feel an impulse
to sign mine. . . ."

In dumb stupefaction, understanding nothing, hearing nothing, Navagin
paced about his study. He touched the curtain over the door, three
times waved his hands like a _jeune premier_ in a ballet when he
sees _her_, gave a whistle and a meaningless smile, and pointed
with his finger into space.

"So I will send off the article at once, your Excellency," said the
secretary.

These words roused Navagin from his stupour. He looked blankly at
the secretary and the sacristan, remembered, and stamping, his foot
irritably, screamed in a high, breaking tenor:

"Leave me in peace! Lea-eave me in peace, I tell you! What you want
of me I don't understand."

The secretary and the sacristan went out of the study and reached
the street while he was still stamping and shouting:

"Leave me in peace! What you want of me I don't understand. Lea-eave
me in peace!"

STRONG IMPRESSIONS

IT happened not so long ago in the Moscow circuit court. The jurymen,
left in the court for the night, before lying down to sleep fell
into conversation about strong impressions. They were led to this
discussion by recalling a witness who, by his own account, had begun
to stammer and had gone grey owing to a terrible moment. The jurymen
decided that before going to sleep, each one of them should ransack
among his memories and tell something that had happened to him.
Man's life is brief, but yet there is no man who cannot boast that
there have been terrible moments in his past.

One juryman told the story of how he was nearly drowned; another
described how, in a place where there were neither doctors nor
chemists, he had one night poisoned his own son through giving him
zinc vitriol by mistake for soda. The child did not die, but the
father nearly went out of his mind. A third, a man not old but in
bad health, told how he had twice attempted to commit suicide: the
first time by shooting himself and the second time by throwing
himself before a train.

The fourth, a foppishly dressed, fat little man, told us the following
story:

"I was not more than twenty-two or twenty-three when I fell head
over ears in love with my present wife and made her an offer. Now