they are
worth their salary! Ye-es, brother, thieves have always been cleverer
than watchmen! Stand still, don't stir. . . ."

Five minutes, ten minutes pass in silence. All at once the wind
brings the sound of a whistle.

"Well, now you can go," says the stranger, releasing the watchman's
arm. "Go and thank God you are alive!"

The stranger gives a whistle too, runs away from the gate, and the
watchman hears him leap over the ditch.

With a foreboding of something very dreadful in his heart, the
watchman, still trembling with terror, opens the gate irresolutely
and runs back with his eyes shut.

At the turning into the main avenue he hears hurried footsteps, and
someone asks him, in a hissing voice: "Is that you, Timofey? Where
is Mitka?"

And after running the whole length of the main avenue he notices a
little dim light in the darkness. The nearer he gets to the light
the more frightened he is and the stronger his foreboding of evil.

"It looks as though the light were in the church," he thinks. "And
how can it have come there? Save me and have mercy on me, Queen of
Heaven! And that it is."

The watchman stands for a minute before the broken window and looks
with horror towards the altar. . . . A little wax candle which the
thieves had forgotten to put out flickers in the wind that bursts
in at the window and throws dim red patches of light on the vestments
flung about and a cupboard overturned on the floor, on numerous
footprints near the high altar and the altar of offerings.

A little time passes and the howling wind sends floating over the
churchyard the hurried uneven clangs of the alarm-bell. . . .

IN THE COURT

AT the district town of N. in the cinnamon-coloured government house
in which the Zemstvo, the sessional meetings of the justices of the
peace, the Rural Board, the Liquor Board, the Military Board, and
many others sit by turns, the Circuit Court was in session on one
of the dull days of autumn. Of the above-mentioned cinnamon-coloured
house a local official had wittily observed:

"Here is Justitia, here is Policia, here is Militia--a regular
boarding school of high-born young ladies."

But, as the saying is, "Too many cooks spoil the broth," and probably
that is why the house strikes, oppresses, and overwhelms a fresh
unofficial visitor with its dismal barrack-like appearance, its
decrepit condition, and the complete absence of any kind of comfort,
external or internal. Even on th