spring air aquiver; the birds were singing, the sun was shining
brightly. The big market square was noisy, swings were going, barrel
organs were playing, accordions were squeaking, drunken voices were
shouting. After midday people began driving up and down the principal
street.

In short, all was merriment, everything was satisfactory, just as
it had been the year before, and as it will be in all likelihood
next year.

A month later a new suffragan bishop was appointed, and no one
thought anything more of Bishop Pyotr, and afterwards he was
completely forgotten. And only the dead man's old mother, who is
living to-day with her son-in-law the deacon in a remote little
district town, when she goes out at night to bring her cow in and
meets other women at the pasture, begins talking of her children
and her grandchildren, and says that she had a son a bishop, and
this she says timidly, afraid that she may not be believed. . . .

And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her.


THE LETTER

The clerical superintendent of the district, his Reverence Father
Fyodor Orlov, a handsome, well-nourished man of fifty, grave and
important as he always was, with an habitual expression of dignity
that never left his face, was walking to and fro in his little
drawing-room, extremely exhausted, and thinking intensely about the
same thing: "When would his visitor go?" The thought worried him