St. John's Eve

Thoma Grigorovich 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 A B C book, every month, or even every week)—one of these gentlemen wormed this same story out of Thoma Grigorovich, 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, showed it to us. Thoma Grigorovich 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.