The street was as yet all alight. Some of the petty shops, those permanent clubs of servants and all sorts of people, were open; others, however, which were closed, showed a long streak of light through the entire length of the door-crack, suggesting that they did not lack company, probably servants of both sexes, who were concluding their gossip and conversation, and keeping their masters in complete ignorance of their whereabouts. Akaki Akakievich walked on in a happy frame of mind, started even to run, for an unknown reason, after a woman who flashed by him like lightning. After this, however, he paused and resumed his former leisurely pace, wondering at his own sudden spurt. Very soon there stretched before him the deserted streets, not particularly cheerful even by day, and much less so by night. Now they seemed even more than usually dark and lonely; the lights were growing further apart; then came wooden houses and fences; not a soul anywhere; only the snow sparkled in the streets; and the slumbering, low-roofed cabins with closed shutters looked melancholy against the snow. He was approaching the spot where the street cut through a vast square, with houses on the other side barely visible across the desert space. In the distance, God knows how far, a tiny flame glimmered in a watchman’s box, which seemed to verge on the edge of the world. Akaki Akakievich’s cheerfulness diminished here perceptibly. He entered the square not without a certain involuntary fear; not without some foreboding of evil. He glanced behind him and on both sides--a sea appeared to surround him. “No, it is better not to look,” he thought, and walked on with closed eyes; and when he opened them to see whether or not he had reached the end of the square, he suddenly beheld before him, almost under his very nose, some bearded individuals, precisely what sort he could not distinguish. Everything grew dark before his eyes, and his heart began to throb. “But, I say, the cloak is mine,” said one of the men in a loud voice, seizing him by the collar. Akaki Akakievich wished to cry out, “Help!” when the other man put his fist, the size of an official’s head, to his very mouth, and said, “Just try to make a noise!” Akaki Akakievich only felt conscious of how they removed the cloak from his shoulders, then gave him a parting kick, which sent him headlong into the snow; after that he felt no more.