Tatiana did not disappoint her admirers. She first crossed herself, and then spat; then she fixed her eyes upon the spot where the bear's retreating form had last been seen, and commenced a speech, half a formula of exorcisation and half pure (or rather very impure) abuse, which certainly did the greatest credit both to her inventive faculties and to her knowledge of the intricacies of the Russian language as arranged specially for the use of vituperative peasants. If one fractional portion of the old woman's curse had taken effect upon its object, the rest of the days of that bear upon this earth would indeed have been days of blighting and misery both for himself and for those who called him son or cousin or husband; his female relatives especially came under condemnation, and most of all she who had brought him into the world; her fate was to be shocking indeed, so much so that I shrink from entering into the matter in detail for fear of wounding the feelings of my readers, who are not perhaps accustomed to the beauties of the Russian peasant's vocabulary, which is exceedingly rich in certain forms of speech. Tatiana's curse, however, produced a great effect upon her fellow villagers, who felt that it was all that the occasion demanded, and that they had for the present obtained satisfaction for the insults heaped upon them by the uninvited stranger; the baby was also, presumably, of this opinion, for it now stopped crying, and began to look about it with eyes full of the last few unshed tears, as though it expected to find the corpse of the bear lying somewhere about as the immediate result of Tatiana's heroics. After this, the souls, accompanied by their female relatives and the children, returned to the village, where the rest of the evening was spent by the majority of the gentlemen in the refinements of _vodka_-drinking and wrangling at the beer-shop. But, alas! shocking though the curse of Tatiana had sounded, and dire as the results ought to have been in the way of utter confusion and annihilation in this world and the next for that bear and all his relations, it soon appeared that somehow or other the malediction had missed its mark. The very next day the creature was seen by a villager who chanced to penetrate somewhat deep into the forest in search of mushrooms; and so far from being any the worse for the liberal cursing it had had, the bear had appeared--so the moujik declared--to be all the better, or rather fiercer for it; it had actually chased him for some little distance, and would have caught him if he had not, most providentially, reached a wide expanse of open ground which the bear had hesitated to cross in daylight.