ld servant Saveluetch was in attendance to accompany me.

Two days later, when we were nearing our destination, a snowstorm
overtook us. We might have perished in the snow, for all traces of the
road were lost, but for a stranger who guided us to a small and lonely
inn, where we passed the night. In the morning, to the sorrow of
Saveluetch, I insisted on giving our guide, who was but thinly clad, one
of my cloaks--a hare-skin _touloup_.

"Thanks, your excellency," said the vagrant, "and may heaven reward you.
As long as I live I shall never forget your kindness."

I soon forgot the snowstorm, the guide, and my hare-skin _touloup_, and
on arrival at Orenburg hasted to wait on the general, an old
comrade-in-arms of my father's. The general received me kindly, examined
my commission, told me there was nothing for me to do in Orenburg, and
sent me on to Fort Belogorsk to serve under Commander Mironoff. Belogorsk
lay about thirty miles beyond Orenburg, on the frontier of the Kirghiz
Kaisak Steppes, and it was to this outlandish place I was banished.

I expected to see high bastions, a wall and a ditch, but there was
nothing at Belogorsk but a little village, surrounded by a wooden
palisade. An old iron cannon was near the gateway, the streets were
narrow and crooked, and the commandant's house to which I had been
driven was a wooden erection.

Vassilissa Ignorofna, the commandant's wife, received me with simple
kindness, and treated me at once as one of the family. An old army
pensioner and Palashka, the one servant, laid the cloth for dinner;
while in the square, near the house, the commandant, a tall and hale old
man, wearing a dressing-gown and a cotton nightcap, was busy drilling
some twenty elderly men--all pensioners.

Chvabrine, an officer who had been dismissed from the guards for
fighting a duel, and Marya, a young girl of sixteen, with a fresh, round
face, the commandant's daughter, were also at dinner.

Mironoff pleaded in excuse for being late for dinner that he had been
busy drilling his little soldiers, but his wife cut him short
ruthlessly.

"Nonsense," she said, "you're only boasting; they are past service, and
you don't remember much about the drill. Far better for you to stay at
home and say your prayers." Vassilissa Ignorofna never seemed to stop
talking, and overwhelmed me with questions.

In the course of a few weeks I found that she not only led her husband
completely, but also directed all mi