of two or three men lying motionless upon the ground. He fixed his
eyes more intently on them, to see whether they were asleep or dead;
and, at the same moment, stumbled over something lying at his feet. It
was the dead body of a woman, a Jewess apparently. She appeared to be
young, though it was scarcely discernible in her distorted and
emaciated features. Upon her head was a red silk kerchief; two rows of
pearls or pearl beads adorned the beads of her head-dress, from
beneath which two long curls hung down upon her shrivelled neck, with
its tightly drawn veins. Beside her lay a child, grasping convulsively
at her shrunken breast, and squeezing it with involuntary ferocity at
finding no milk there. He neither wept nor screamed, and only his
gently rising and falling body would have led one to guess that he was
not dead, or at least on the point of breathing his last. They turned
into a street, and were suddenly stopped by a madman, who, catching
sight of Andrii's precious burden, sprang upon him like a tiger, and
clutched him, yelling, "Bread!" But his strength was not equal to his
madness. Andrii repulsed him and he fell to the ground. Moved with
pity, the young Cossack flung him a loaf, which he seized like a mad
dog, gnawing and biting it; but nevertheless he shortly expired in
horrible suffering, there in the street, from the effect of long
abstinence. The ghastly victims of hunger startled them at every step.
Many, apparently unable to endure their torments in their houses,
seemed to run into the streets to see whether some nourishing power
might not possibly descend from the air. At the gate of one house sat
an old woman, and it was impossible to say whether she was asleep or
dead, or only unconscious; at all events, she no longer saw or heard
anything, and sat immovable in one spot, her head drooping on her
breast. From the roof of another house hung a worn and wasted body in
a rope noose. The poor fellow could not endure the tortures of hunger
to the last, and had preferred to hasten his end by a voluntary death.