“How was it that thou didst see her?” muttered the astounded Alexyei Sergyeitch, who now heard a coherent speech from him for the first time.—­“What is she like?  Has she a scythe?”

“No,” replied Prince L.—­“She’s a plain old woman in a loose gown—­only she has but one eye in her forehead, and that eye has no lid.”

And on the following day Prince L. actually expired, after having fulfilled all his religious obligations and taken leave of every one intelligently and with emotion.

“That’s the way I shall die also,” Alexyei Sergyeitch was wont to remark.  And, in fact, something similar happened with him—­of which, later on.

But now let us return to our former subject.  Alexyei Sergyeitch did not consort with the neighbours, as I have already said; and they did not like him any too well, calling him eccentric, arrogant, a mocker, and even a Martinist who did not recognise the authorities, without themselves understanding, of course, the meaning of the last word.  To a certain extent the neighbours were right.  Alexyei Sergyeitch had resided for nearly seventy years in succession in his Sukhodol, having almost no dealings whatever with the superior authorities, with the military officials, or the courts.  “The court is for the bandit, the military officer for the soldier,” he was wont to say; “but I, God be thanked, am neither a bandit nor a soldier.”  Alexyei Sergyeitch really was somewhat eccentric, but the soul within him was not of the petty sort.  I will narrate a few things about him.

I never found out authoritatively what were his political views, if, indeed, one can apply to him such a very new-fangled expression; but he was, in his way, rather an aristocrat than a nobly-born master of serfs.  More than once he complained because God had not given him a son and heir “for the honour of the race, for the continuation of the family.”  On the wall of his study hung the genealogical tree of the Telyegins, with very profuse branches, and multitudinous circles in the shape of apples, enclosed in a gilt frame.

“We Telyegins,"[32] he said, “are a very ancient stock, existing from remote antiquity; there have been a great many of us Telyegins, but we have not run after foreigners, we have not bowed our backs, we have not wearied ourselves by standing on the porches of the mighty, we have not nourished ourselves on the courts, we have not earned wages, we have not pined for Moscow, we have not intrigued in Peter;[33] we have sat still, each on his place, his own master on his own land ... thrifty, domesticated birds, my dear sir!—­Although I myself have served in the Guards, yet it was not for long, I thank you!”