top! tell me first what you are reading."

I confess that I was a trifle stunned by such a question.

"What! what am I reading, Thoma Grigorovich? These were your very
words."

"Who told you that they were my words?"

"Why, what more would you have? Here it is printed: _Related by such
and such a sacristan_."

"Spit on the head of the man who printed that! he lies, the dog of a
Moscow pedlar! Did I say that? _'Twas just the same as though one
hadn't his wits about him!_ Listen, I'll tell it to you on the spot."

We moved up to the table, and he began.

* * * * *

My grandfather (the kingdom of heaven be his! may he eat only wheaten
rolls and makovniki[4] with honey in the other world!) could tell a
story wonderfully well. When he used to begin on a tale, you wouldn't
stir from the spot all day, but keep on listening. He was no match for
the story-teller of the present day, when he begins to lie, with a
tongue as though he had had nothing to eat for three days, so that you
snatch your cap, and flee from the house. As I now recall it, my old
mother was alive then, in the long winter evenings when the frost was
crackling out of doors, and had so sealed up hermetically the narrow
panes of our cottage, she used to sit before the hackling-comb,
drawing out a long thread in her hand, rocking the cradle with her
foot, and humming a song, which I seem to hear even now.

[4] Poppy-seeds cooked in honey, and dried in square cakes.

The fat-lamp, quivering and flaring up as though in fear of something,
lighted us within our cottage; the spindle hummed; and all of us
children, collected in a cluster, listened to grandfather, who had not
crawled off the oven for more than five years, owing to his great age.
But the wondrous tales of the incursions of the Zaporozhian Cossacks,
the Poles, the bold deeds of Podkova, of Poltor-Kozhukh, and
Sagaidatchnii, did not interest us so much as the stories about some
deed of old which always sent a shiver through our frames, and made
our hair rise upright on our heads. Sometimes such terror took
possession of us in consequence of them, that, from that evening on,
Heaven knows what a marvel everything seemed to us. If you chanced to
go out of the cottage after nightfall for anything, you imagine that a
visitor from the other world has lain down to sleep in your bed; and I
should not be able to tell this a second time were it not that I had
often taken