en expected: and when the doctor arrived, he
found, on feeling the sick man's pulse, that there was nothing to be
done, except to prescribe a fomentation, so that the patient might not
be left entirely without the beneficent aid of medicine; but at the same
time, he predicted his end in thirty-six hours. After this he turned to
the landlady, and said, "And as for you, don't waste your time on him:
order his pine coffin now, for an oak one will be too expensive for
him." Did Akakiy Akakievitch hear these fatal words? and if he heard
them, did they produce any overwhelming effect upon him? Did he
lament the bitterness of his life?--We know not, for he continued in a
delirious condition. Visions incessantly appeared to him, each stranger
than the other. Now he saw Petrovitch, and ordered him to make a cloak,
with some traps for robbers, who seemed to him to be always under the
bed; and cried every moment to the landlady to pull one of them from
under his coverlet. Then he inquired why his old mantle hung before him
when he had a new cloak. Next he fancied that he was standing before
the prominent person, listening to a thorough setting-down, and saying,
"Forgive me, your excellency!" but at last he began to curse, uttering
the most horrible words, so that his aged landlady crossed herself,
never in her life having heard anything of the kind from him, the more
so as those words followed directly after the words "your excellency."
Later on he talked utter nonsense, of which nothing could be made: all
that was evident being, that his incoherent words and thoughts hovered
ever about one thing, his cloak.

At length poor Akakiy Akakievitch breathed his last. They sealed up
neither his room nor his effects, because, in the first place, there
were no heirs, and, in the second, there was very little to inherit
beyond a bundle of goose-quills, a quire of white official paper, three
pairs of socks, two or three buttons which had burst off his trousers,
and the mantle already known to the reader. To whom all this fell, God
knows. I confess that the person who told me this tale took no interest
in the matter. They carried Akakiy Akakievitch out and buried him.

And St. Petersburg was left without Akakiy Akakievitch, as though he had
never lived there. A being disappeared who was protected by none, dear
to none, interesting to none, and who never even attracted to himself
the attention of those students of human nature who omit no oppo