usual heedlessness, a strange thing
happened to him. All at once he heard some one behind him say in a
distinct voice, "Afanasy Ivan'itch!" He turned round, but there was no
one there. He looked on all sides; he peered into the shrubbery,--no one
anywhere. The day was calm and the sun was shining brightly. He pondered
for a moment. Then his face lighted up, and at last he cried, "It is
Pulkheria Ivanovna calling me!"

He surrendered himself utterly to the moral conviction that Pulkheria
Ivanovna was calling him. He yielded with the meekness of a submissive
child, withered up, coughed, melted away like a candle, and at last
expired like it when nothing remains to feed its poor flame. "Lay me
beside Pulkheria Ivan'na"--that was all he said before his death.

His wish was fulfilled; and they buried him beside the churchyard wall
close to Pulkheria Ivanovna's grave. The guests at the funeral were few,
but there was a throng of common and poor people. The house was already
quite deserted. The enterprising clerk and village elder carried off to
their cottages all the old household utensils which the housekeeper did
not manage to appropriate.

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,'
by Isabel F. Hapgood

[Illustration: CARLO GOLDONI.]

CARLO GOLDONI

(1707-1793)

BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON

Italy is generally felt to be, above all other lands, the natural home
of the drama. In acting, as in music, indeed, the sceptre has never
wholly passed from her: Ristori and Salvini certainly are not yet
forgotten. The Graeco-Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, the
rhetorical tragedy of Seneca, have had a far more direct hand in molding
the modern dramatists' art than have the loftier creative masterpieces
of the great Attic Four. Indeed, Latin has never become in Italy a
really dead language, remote from the popular consciousness. The
splendor of the Church ritual, the great mass of the educated clergy,
the almost purely Latin roots of the vernacular, have made such a loss
impossible.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Terence and Plautus were often
revived on the stage, still oftener imitated in Latin. Many of the
greatest names in modern Italian literature are in some degree
associated with drama. Thus Machiavelli made free Italian versions from
both the comic Latin poets, and wrote a powerful though immoral prose
comedy, 'The Magic Draught' (Mandragola). Tasso