Lukerya relates her terrible dreams, how Death has appeared before her; not that she dreads his coming, but he always goes away and will not deliver her. She refuses all offers of assistance from her young master; she desires nothing, needs nothing, is perfectly content. As her visitor is about to leave her, she calls him back for a last word. She seems to be conscious (how feminine is this!) of the terrible impression she must have made upon him, and says: “Do you remember, master, what beautiful hair I had? You know it reached to my knees.... I hesitated a long time about cutting it off, but what could I do with it as I am? So--I cut it off.... Adieu, master!” * * * * * In “The District Doctor,” which is appended in a new translation, we find a fuller and even more characteristic specimen of Turgenev’s story-telling. Both reveal the warm heart of the great man, and his unfailing sympathy, which his own painful despair was never allowed to suppress. FOOTNOTES: [2] From “A Sportman’s Sketches.” THE DISTRICT DOCTOR _By Ivan Turgenev_ Returning from a distant field one autumn day, I fell ill with a bad cold. Luckily for me, the fever caught me in the district town, in a hotel. I sent for the doctor. After a half-hour, the district physician appeared--a dark, meagre little man. He prescribed the customary sudorific and a mustard-plaster; and dexterously inserting into his cuff my five-ruble note--coughing dryly and glancing sideways as he did so--he was about to depart, but somehow began to talk and remained. The fever made me restless; anticipating a sleepless night, I was glad to have some one to chat with. Tea was brought in. The doctor was in a conversational mood. He was not a bad fellow, and expressed himself well and divertingly. How strange it is with men! You have known one for a long time and are intimate with him, yet not once have you ventured to talk with him frankly, from your very soul; another you have hardly become acquainted with, and yet--either you tell him or else he tells you, as if in confessional, his very inmost thoughts. I do not know how I earned the confidence of my new acquaintance; but he somehow or other “got started,” as they say, and told me a really remarkable tale, which I present here to the sympathetic reader. I shall try to express the story in the doctor’s own words.