In the domain of fantasy, Gogol’s masterpiece is to be found in this same collection. It is called _Viy_. It is the story of a beautiful lady who is a witch. She casts her spell on a student in theology, and when she dies, her dying will is that he shall spend three nights in reading prayers over her body, in the church where her coffin lies. During his watch on the first night, the dead maiden rises from her coffin, and watches him with glassy, opaque eyes. He hears the flapping of the wings of innumerable birds, and in the morning is found half dead from terror. He attempts to avoid the ordeal on the second night, but the girl’s father, an old Cossack, forces him to carry out his daughter’s behest, and three nights are spent by the student in terrible conflict with the witch. On the third night he dies. The great quality of this story is the atmosphere of overmastering terror that it creates. With these two stories, _Taras Bulba_ and _Viy_, Gogol took leave of Romanticism and Fantasy, and started on the path of Realism. In this province he was what the Germans call a _bahnbrecher_, and he discovered a new kingdom. It may be noticed that Gogol, roughly speaking, began where Dickens ended; that is to say, he wrote his _Tale of Two Cities_ first, and his _Pickwick_ last. But already in this collection of Mirgorod tales there are two stories in the humorous realistic vein, which Gogol never excelled; one is called _Old-fashioned Landowners_, and the other _How Ivan Ivanovitch quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovitch_. _Old-fashioned Landowners_ is a simple story. It is about an old couple who lived in a low-roofed little house, with a verandah of blackened tree-trunks, in the midst of a garden of dwarfed fruit-trees covered with cherries and plums. The couple, Athanasii Ivanovitch and his wife Pulcheria Ivanovna, are old. He is sixty, she is fifty-five. It is the story of Philemon and Baucis. Nothing happens in it, except that we are introduced to these charming, kind, and hospitable people; that Pulcheria dies, and that after her death everything in the house becomes untidy and slovenly, because Athanasii cannot live without her; and after five years he follows her to the grave, and is buried beside her. There is nothing in the story, and there is everything. It is amusing, charming, and infinitely pathetic. Some of the touches of description remind one strongly of Dickens. Here, for instance, is a description of the doors of the house where the old couple lived: