(RELATED BY THE SACRISTAN OF THE DIKANKA CHURCH)




Thoma Grigorovitch had a very strange sort of eccentricity: to the day
of his death he never liked to tell the same thing twice. There were
times when, if you asked him to relate a thing afresh, behold, he would
interpolate new matter, or alter it so that it was impossible to
recognize it. Once on a time, one of those gentlemen (it is hard for us
simple people to put a name to them, to say whether they are scribblers
or not scribblers: but it is just the same thing as the usurers at our
yearly fairs; they clutch and beg and steal every sort of frippery, and
issue mean little volumes, no thicker than an ABC book, every month, or
even every week),--one of these gentlemen wormed this same story out of
Thoma Grigorovitch, and he completely forgot about it. But that same
young gentleman in the pea-green caftan, whom I have mentioned, and one
of whose Tales you have already read, I think, came from Poltava,
bringing with him a little book, and, opening it in the middle, shows it
to us. Thoma Grigorovitch was on the point of setting his spectacles
astride of his nose, but recollected that he had forgotten to wind
thread about them, and stick them together with wax, so he passed it
over to me. As I understand something about reading and writing, and do
not wear spectacles, I undertook to read it. I had not turned two
leaves, when all at once he caught me by the hand, and stopped me.

"Stop! tell me first what you are reading."