who, terror-stricken, says that she never likes such jokes. Both men burst into hearty laughter. A short time after, the doctor crushes the skull of Alexis in the presence of his wife. In the midst of the horror and confusion of the household, the murderer slips out, goes home, and is resting calmly, thinking with intense delight of the splendid success of the plan, and of the extraordinary skill he had shown in its conception and execution; when, just as he was dropping off to sleep in delicious drowsiness, there "languidly" entered into his head this thought: it speaks to his mind in the third person, as though somebody else had actually said it: It is very possible that Dr. Kerzhentsev is really insane. He thought that he simulated, but he is really insane--insane at this very instant. After this poison has entered his soul, his condition can be easily imagined. A terrible debate begins in his own mind, for he is fighting against himself for his own reason. Every argument that he can think of to persuade himself of his sanity he marshals; but there are plenty of arguments on the other side. The story is an excellent example of what Merezhkovski must mean by the passion of thought. Another illustration of Andreev's uncanny power is seen in the short story "Silence." A father does not understand his daughter's silence, and treats her nervous suffering with harsh practicality. She commits suicide; the mother is stricken with paralysis; silence reigns in the house. Silence. The father beseeches his wife to speak to him; there is no speculation in her wide-open eyes. He cries aloud to his dead daughter. Silence. Nothing but silence, and the steady approach of madness. Andreev is an unflinching realist, with all the Russian power of the concrete phrase. He would never say, in describing a battle, that the Russians "suffered a severe loss." He would turn a magnifying glass on each man. But, although he is a realist and above all a psychologist, he is also a poet. In the sketch "Silence" there is the very spirit of poetry. The most recent bit of writing by him that I have seen is called a Fantasy*--"Life is so Beautiful to the Resurrected." This is a meditation in a graveyard, written in the manner of one of Turgenev's "Poems in Prose," though lacking something of that master's exquisite beauty of style. It is, however, not sentimentally conventional, but original. The poetic quality in Andreev animates all his dramas, particularly "To the Stars." *Translated in "Current Literature," New York, for September 1910. X KUPRIN'S PICTURE OF GARRISON LIFE