At times he gives one the impression of having just arrived from some distant country, where people think and feel differently and their relations and language are different. He sits in a corner tired and gray, as though the dust of another earth were on him, and he looks attentively at everything with the look of a foreigner or of a dumb man. Yesterday, before dinner, he came into the drawing-room, just like that, his thoughts far away. He sat down on the sofa, and, after a moment's silence, suddenly said, swaying his body a little, rubbing the palm of his hand on his knee, and wrinkling up his face:

    "Still that is not all -- not all."

    Some one, always stolidly stupid as a flat-iron, asked: "What do you say?"

    He looked at him fixedly, and then, bending forward and looking onto the terrace where I was sitting with Doctor Nikitin and

    "Plehve."

    "Plehve . . . Plehve . . ." he repeated musingly after a pause, as though he heard the name for the first time. Then he shook himself, like a bird, and asked with a faint smile:

    "To-day from early morning I have had a silly thing running in my head; some one once told me that he saw the following epitaph in a cemetery:

    and something like that. . . ." He was silent, and then, nodding his head and smiling faintly, added: "In human stupidity, when it is not malicious, there is something very

    They called us to come to dinner.