Angrily she shook her head at Alexiev. “It is not my fault,” he said deprecatingly. “I tried to stir up the children, but they would not listen to me.” Swiftly depositing the coffee-pot upon the table, she caught up little Andriusha from the floor, and gently seated him upon the sofa by Oblomov’s side; whereupon the child wriggled towards him, climbed his form until he had reached his face, and grasped him firmly by the nose. “Hi! Hullo! Who is that?” cried Oblomov uneasily as he opened his eyes. “You had gone to sleep, so Andriusha climbed on to the sofa and awoke you,” replied the landlady kindly. “I had gone to sleep, indeed?” retorted Oblomov, laying his arm around the little one. “Do you think I did not hear him creeping along on all fours? Why, I hear _everything_. To think of the little rascal catching me by the nose! I’ll give it him! But there, there.” Tenderly embracing the child, he deposited him on the floor again, and heaved a profound sigh. “Tell us the news, Ivan Alexiev,” he said. “You have heard it all. I have nothing more to tell.” “How so? You go into society, and I do not. Is there nothing new in the political world?” “It is being said that the earth is growing colder every day, and that one day it will become frozen altogether.” “Away with you! Is _that_ politics?” A silence ensued. Oblomov quietly relapsed into a state of coma that was neither sleeping nor waking. He merely let his thoughts wander at will, without concentrating them upon anything in particular as calmly he listened to the beating of his heart and occasionally blinked his eyes. Thus he sank into a vague, enigmatical condition which partook largely of the nature of hallucination. In rare instances there come to a man fleeting moments of abstraction when he seems to be reliving past stages of his life. Whether he has previously beheld in sleep the phenomena which are passing before his vision, or whether he has gone through a previous existence and has since forgotten it, we cannot say; but at all events he can see the same persons around him as were present in the first instance, and hear the same words as were uttered then. So was it with Oblomov now. Gradually there spread itself about him the hush which he had known long ago. He could hear the beating of the well-known pendulum, the snapping of the thread as it was bitten off, and the repetition of familiar whispered sentences like “I cannot make the thread go through the eye of the needle. Pray do it for me, Masha--your eyesight is keener than mine.” Lazily, mechanically he looked into his landlady’s face; and straightway from the recesses of his memory there arose a picture which, somewhere, had been well known to him.