May her dear shade pardon this belated blossom, which I make bold to lay upon her grave! _September 1878._ THE LAST MEETING We had once been close and warm friends.... But an unlucky moment came ... and we parted as enemies. Many years passed by.... And coming to the town where he lived, I learnt that he was helplessly ill, and wished to see me. I made my way to him, went into his room.... Our eyes met. I hardly knew him. God! what sickness had done to him! Yellow, wrinkled, completely bald, with a scanty grey beard, he sat clothed in nothing but a shirt purposely slit open.... He could not bear the weight of even the lightest clothes. Jerkily he stretched out to me his fearfully thin hand that looked as if it were gnawed away, with an effort muttered a few indistinct words--whether of welcome or reproach, who can tell? His emaciated chest heaved, and over the dwindled pupils of his kindling eyes rolled two hard-wrung tears of suffering. My heart sank.... I sat down on a chair beside him, and involuntarily dropping my eyes before the horror and hideousness of it, I too held out my hand. But it seemed to me that it was not his hand that took hold of me. It seemed to me that between us is sitting a tall, still, white woman. A long robe shrouds her from head to foot. Her deep, pale eyes look into vacancy; no sound is uttered by her pale, stern lips. This woman has joined our hands.... She has reconciled us for ever. Yes.... Death has reconciled us.... _April 1878._ A VISIT I was sitting at the open window ... in the morning, the early morning of the first of May. The dawn had not yet begun; but already the dark, warm night grew pale and chill at its approach. No mist had risen, no breeze was astir, all was colourless and still ... but the nearness of the awakening could be felt, and the rarer air smelt keen and moist with dew. Suddenly, at the open window, with a light whirr and rustle, a great bird flew into my room. I started, looked closely at it.... It was not a bird; it was a tiny winged woman, dressed in a narrow long robe flowing to her feet. She was grey all over, the colour of mother-of-pearl; only the inner side of her wings glowed with the tender flush of an opening rose; a wreath of valley lilies entwined the scattered curls upon her little round head; and, like a butterfly’s feelers, two peacock feathers waved drolly above her lovely rounded brow. She fluttered twice about the ceiling; her tiny face was laughing; laughing, too, were her great, clear, black eyes. The gay frolic of her sportive flight set them flashing like diamonds. She held in her hand the long stalk of a flower of the steppes--‘the Tsar’s sceptre,’ the Russians call it--it is really like a sceptre. Flying rapidly above me, she touched my head with the flower. I rushed towards her.... But already she had fluttered out of window, and darted away....