"By the side of the fire the shepherd looked fearfully on all sides. Far off, in the pale blue sky, a star broke away; it fell with a long tail of fire, and went out. 'Some one will die,' sighed the shepherd. The words of the Spirit flashed through his mind. 'H'm!' he said. 'If I taste, perhaps the contrary is true, who knows?' So thinking, he put his finger on the heart on the spit and carried it to his mouth. The sensation was unspeakably pleasant. He laughed; then quickly ate the whole heart. Immediately there rose within him a cruel passion towards the sleeping Spirit; upon the spot he killed it and took the heart. At once there came to him the strength of a giant, the ground began to tremble beneath his footsteps, while aerial voices, and voices from the water, sounded round him. Creatures never seen before emerged from the pool; linked together by their white hands they danced round in whirling circles. Thus changed, he reached his comrade at the fold, and tried to explain, but his thoughts were elsewhere, and his voice sounded as though from another world. He finished with broken words: 'The water calls me--tell no one what has happened to me--take my flute: if danger threatens come to the pool and sing to me.' "During the evenings that followed Virghea saw naught of the shepherd, and she wondered at not seeing him, expecting him from day to day. So days passed that seemed like weeks, and weeks seemed months, and they went by without any news of him till the poor maiden took to her bed from grief. Then the comrade of the hills remembered the shepherd's words. He came at midnight to the side of the pool and sang--a long time he sang. Towards dawn, when the strains of the flute died away, there came from Gramuste the sound of two strokes of a bell, then another two, and others in succession, mournful, prolonged. The echoes answered back, as though other bells were ringing in other places, resounding from hill to hill until they reached the bottom of the pool, and after a time, to the voice of the bells were joined real words, sobbing to the rhythm: 'Virghea is dead--is dead!'" Ghicu Sina paused a while. Although he had only told me these things quite briefly, I felt their secret had entered my soul; with my eyes upon the pool where the strange reflections constantly played, I seemed to hear, as one sometimes hears the faint voice of memory from a remote past, the sound of the bells and their metallic words: "Virghea is dead--is dead!" And then, the story adds, he rose from the pool. Like the wind, he raised her in his arms and carried her deep down to his translucent palace where, to this day, little fiery points of light burn round the head of the dead woman. OLD NICHIFOR, THE IMPOSTOR By I. CREANGA Old Nichifor is not a character out of a story-book but a real man like other men; he was once, when he was alive, an inhabitant of the Tzutzuen quarter of the town of Neamtzu, towards the village of Neamtzu Vinatori.