Perhaps you meet the funeral procession of some officer coming from the church, with rose-colored coffin, and music and fluttering banners; perhaps the sounds of firing reach your ear from the bastion, but this does not lead you back to your former thoughts; the funeral seems to you a very fine military spectacle, and you do not connect with this spectacle, or with the sounds, any clear idea of suffering and death, as you did at the point where the bandaging was going on. Passing the barricade and the church, you come to the most lively part of the city. On both sides hang the signs of shops and inns. Merchants, women in bonnets and kerchiefs, dandified officers,—everything speaks to you of the firmness of spirit, of the independence and the security of the inhabitants. Enter the inn on the right if you wish to hear the conversations of sailors and officers; stories of the preceding night are sure to be in progress there, and of Fenka, and the affair of the 24th, and of the dearness and badness of cutlets, and of such and such a comrade who has been killed. “Devil take it, how bad things are with us to-day!” ejaculates the bass voice of a beardless naval officer, with white brows and lashes, in a green knitted sash. “Where?” asks another. “In the fourth bastion,” replies the young officer, and you are certain to look at the white-lashed officer with great attention, and even with some respect, at the words, “in the fourth bastion.” His excessive ease of manner, the way he flourishes his hands, his loud laugh, and his voice, which seems to you insolent, reveal to you that peculiar boastful frame of mind which some very young men acquire after danger; nevertheless, you think he is about to tell you how bad the condition of things on the fourth bastion is because of the bombs and balls. Nothing of the sort! things are bad because it is muddy. “It's impossible to pass through the battery,” says he, pointing at his boots, which are covered with mud above the calf. “And my best gun-captain was killed to-day; he was struck plump in the forehead,” says another. “Who's that? Mitiukhin?” “No!... What now, are they going to give me any veal? the villains!” he adds to the servant of the inn. “Not Mitiukhin, but Abrosimoff. Such a fine young fellow!—he was in the sixth sally.”