is opinion I might die quite
suddenly--tomorrow, for instance--there had been such cases. Only a day
or two since a young lady at Colomna who suffered from consumption, and
was about on a par with myself in the march of the disease, was going
out to market to buy provisions, when she suddenly felt faint, lay down
on the sofa, gasped once, and died.

"Kislorodoff told me all this with a sort of exaggerated devil-may-care
negligence, and as though he did me great honour by talking to me
so, because it showed that he considered me the same sort of exalted
Nihilistic being as himself, to whom death was a matter of no
consequence whatever, either way.

"At all events, the fact remained--a month of life and no more! That he
is right in his estimation I am absolutely persuaded.

"It puzzles me much to think how on earth the prince guessed yesterday
that I have had bad dreams. He said to me, 'Your excitement and dreams
will find relief at Pavlofsk.' Why did he say 'dreams'? Either he is a
doctor, or else he is a man of exceptional intelligence and wonderful
powers of observation. (But that he is an 'idiot,' at bottom there can
be no doubt whatever.) It so happened that just before he arrived I had
a delightful little dream; one of a kind that I have hundreds of just
now. I had fallen asleep about an hour before he came in, and dreamed
that I was in some room, not my own. It was a large room, well
furnished, with a cupboard, chest of drawers, sofa, and my bed, a fine
wide bed covered with a silken counterpane. But I observed in the room
a dreadful-looking creature, a sort of monster. It was a little like a
scorpion, but was not a scorpion, but far more horrible, and especially
so, because there are no creatures anything like it in nature, and
because it had appeared to me for a purpose, and bore some mysterious
signification. I looked at the beast well; it was brown in colour and
had a shell; it was a crawling kind of reptile, about eight inches long,
and narrowed down from the head, which was about a couple of fingers in
width, to the end of the tail, which came to a fine point. Out of its
trunk, about a couple of inches below its head, came two legs at an
angle of forty-five degrees, each about three inches long, so that the
beast looked like a trident from above. It had eight hard needle-like
whiskers coming out from different parts of its body; it went along like
a snake, bending its body about in spite of the shell it wor