ounsellor, pursued by his
image in the morning-gown, hurry past the window repeatedly. On a
sudden all was quiet.

"We gazed on each other; the boldest among us proposed to cross over
to the house--we all agreed to it. We crossed the street--the huge
bell at the old man's door was rung thrice, but nothing could be heard
in answer; we sent to the police and to a blacksmith's--the door was
broken open, the whole tide of anxious visitors poured up the wide
silent staircase--all the doors were fastened; at length one was
opened. In a splendid apartment, the Counsellor, his iron-grey
frock-coat torn to pieces, his neatly dressed hair in horrible
disorder, lay dead, strangled, on the sofa.

"Since that time no traces of Barighi have been found, neither in
Stuttgart nor elsewhere."

ST. JOHN'S EVE[3]

BY NIKOLAI VASILEVICH GOGOL

[3] From _St. John's Eve and Other Stories_, translated by
Isabel F. Hapgood from the Russian of N. V. Gogol.
(Copyright, 1886, by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. By permission of
the Publishers.)

Thoma Grigorovich had a very strange sort of eccentricity: to the day
of his death, he never liked to tell the same thing twice. There were
times, when, if you asked him to relate a thing afresh, behold, he
would interpolate new matter, or alter it so that it was impossible to
recognize it. Once on a time, one of those gentlemen (it is hard for
us simple people to put a name to them, to say whether they are
scribblers, or not scribblers: but it is just the same thing as the
usurers at our yearly fairs; they clutch and beg and steal every sort
of frippery, and issue mean little volumes, no thicker than an A B C
book, every month, or even every week),--one of these gentlemen wormed
this same story out of Thoma Grigorovich, and he completely forgot
about it. But that same young gentleman in the pea-green caftan, whom
I have mentioned, and one of whose tales you have already read, I
think, came from Poltava, bringing with him a little book, and,
opening it in the middle, shows it to us. Thoma Grigorovich was on the
point of setting his spectacles astride of his nose, but recollected
that he had forgotten to wind thread about them, and stick them
together with wax, so he passed it over to me. As I understand
something about reading and writing, and do not wear spectacles, I
undertook to read it. I had not turned two leaves, when all at once he
caught me by the hand, and stopped me.

"S