In “Four Days,” which follows in an original translation for this series, we have another autobiographical story of singular penetration. It must be remembered that Garshin’s convictions of duty led him to unusual length--he enlisted as a private, when his family connections would have warranted something better. So he writes from close to the people--in this respect differing from Tolstoi, with whose memorable Sevastopol sketches Garshin’s “Four Days” has been seriously compared by critics. It was at the engagement of Aislar that Garshin received his incapacitating bullet-wound, after real gallantry in action, and Aislar is the battle of the story. After recovering from his wound, our author became desperately absorbed in trying to save one of his friends from execution for having attempted the life of Loris Melikov, but Garshin failed, and soon afterward it again became necessary to confine him in an asylum. From this seizure he recovered, and married a young lady who devoted her life to a beautiful service--that of healing his mind and preventing a recurrence of his malady; but, sadly enough, without success. He never shook off the boding pall of the madhouse. One needs only to read his “Red Flower” to feel the haunting presence of that pathetic colony of abnormal minds and spirits coming to sit with him in hours when he sought happiness in forgetfulness. Half-memories of days of half-self-possession are indeed shapes that haunt the dusk! To quote Waliszewski’s vivid summary: “The story describes a demented person, half-conscious of his condition, who wears himself out in superhuman efforts to gain possession of a red-poppy--reddened, as he imagines, by the blood of all the martyrdoms of the human race. If the flower were only destroyed, he thinks, humanity would be saved.” In 1887, in physical and mental suffering too combinedly torturing to be borne, Garshin eluded the watchers by his bedside and flung himself down a stone staircase, sustaining injuries from which he never recovered. The consciousness of his act caused him to brood still more painfully over his state, and he died in a hospital the next year, 1888, at the age of only thirty-three. If one may venture to be analytical, there are three kinds of stories: those told of life as it exists apart from the narrator; those dealing with events intimately associated with the narrator; and those that are purely evoked from the inner life of the story-teller himself. These last-named--spun of gossamer thread, intangible as the dawn, airy, floating, subtle--are the highest type. To this height Garshin did not perfectly attain. His stories were rather of the second sort, drawn from his own experiences. That they were touched with mysterious moods and vague, unnamable potencies must have been due to the author’s pitiful journeys into that shadowy, distraught land which we so confidently call the Insane. * * * * *