e body was chilled. One would walk
for three blessed hours in the frost, your Holiness, and lose all
human semblance. Your legs are drawn up, there is a weight on your
chest, your stomach is pinched; above all, there is a pain in your
heart that is worse than anything. Your heart aches beyond all
endurance, and there is a wretchedness all over your body as though
you were leading Death by the hand instead of an old woman. You are
numb all over, turned to stone like a statue; you go on and feel
as though it were not you walking, but someone else moving your
legs instead of you. When your soul is frozen you don't know what
you are doing: you are ready to leave the old woman with no one to
guide her, or to pull a hot roll from off a hawker's tray, or to
fight with someone. And when you come to your night's lodging into
the warmth after the frost, there is not much joy in that either!
You lie awake till midnight, crying, and don't know yourself what
you are crying for. . . ."

"We must walk about the skating-ground before it gets dark," said
the governor's wife, who was bored with listening. "Who's coming
with me?"

The governor's wife went out and the whole company trooped out of
the pavilion after her. Only the governor, the bishop, and the mayor
remained.

"Queen of Heaven! and what I went through when I was a shopboy in
a fish-shop!" Yegor Ivanitch went on, flinging up his arms so that
his fox-lined coat fell open. "One would go out to the shop almost
before it was light . . . by eight o'clock I was completely frozen,
my face was blue, my fingers were stiff so that I could not fasten
my buttons nor count the money. One would stand in the cold, turn
numb, and think, 'Lord, I shall have to stand like this right on
till evening!' By dinner-time my stomach was pinched and my heart
was aching. . . . Yes! And I was not much better afterwards when I
had a shop of my own. The frost was intense and the shop was like
a mouse-trap with draughts blowing in all directions; the coat I
had on was, pardon me, mangy, as thin as paper, threadbare. . . .
One would be chilled through and through, half dazed, and turn as
cruel as the frost oneself: I would pull one by the ear so that I
nearly pulled the ear off; I would smack another on the back of the
head; I'd glare at a customer like a ruffian, a wild beast, and be
ready to fleece him; and when I got home in the evening and ought
to have gone to bed, I'd be ill-humoured and set upon