his feet, order some one--his brothers probably--to be punished. ‘Beat ‘em!’ he growled hoarsely, coughing and choking with laughter; ‘flog ‘em, don’t spare ‘em! beat, beat, beat the monsters, my oppressors! That’s it! That’s it!’ On the day before his death he greatly alarmed and astonished Alexey Sergeitch. He came, pale and subdued, into his room, and, making him a low obeisance, first thanked him for his care and kindness, and then asked him to send for a priest, for death had come to him--he had seen death, and he must forgive every one and purify his soul. ‘How did you see death?’ muttered Alexey Sergeitch in bewilderment at hearing connected speech from him for the first time. ‘In what shape? with a scythe?’ ‘No,’ answered Prince L.; ‘a simple old woman in a jacket, but with only one eye in her forehead, and that eye without an eyelid.’ And the next day Prince L. actually did die, duly performing everything, and taking leave of every one in a rational and affecting manner. ‘That’s just how I shall die,’ Alexey Sergeitch would sometimes observe. And, as a fact, something of the same sort did happen with him--but of that later. But now let us go back to our story. Of the neighbours, as I have stated already, Alexey Sergeitch saw little; and they did not care much for him, called him a queer fish, stuck up, and a scoffer, and even a ‘martiniste’ who recognised no authorities, though they had no clear idea of the meaning of this term. To a certain extent the neighbours were right: Alexey Sergeitch had lived in his Suhodol for almost seventy years on end, and had had hardly anything whatever to do with the existing authorities, with the police or the law-courts. ‘Police-courts are for the robber, and discipline for the soldier,’ he used to say; ‘but I, thank God, am neither robber nor soldier!’ Rather queer Alexey Sergeitch certainly was, but the soul within him was by no means a petty one. I will tell you something about him.