a day . . . the frosts were cruel, wicked.  One would go out with the old woman and begin suffering torments.  My Creator!  First of all you would be shivering as in a fever, shrugging and dancing about.  Then your ears, your fingers, your feet, would begin aching.  They would ache as though someone were squeezing them with pincers.  But all that would have been nothing, a trivial matter, of no great consequence.  The trouble was when your whole body was chilled.  One would walk for three blessed hours in the frost, your Holiness, and lose all human semblance.  Your legs are drawn up, there is a weight on your chest, your stomach is pinched; above all, there is a pain in your heart that is worse than anything.  Your heart aches beyond all endurance, and there is a wretchedness all over your body as though you were leading Death by the hand instead of an old woman.  You are numb all over, turned to stone like a statue; you go on and feel as though it were not you walking, but someone else moving your legs instead of you.  When your soul is frozen you don’t know what you are doing:  you are ready to leave the old woman with no one to guide her, or to pull a hot roll from off a hawker’s tray, or to fight with someone.  And when you come to your night’s lodging into the warmth after the frost, there is not much joy in that either!  You lie awake till midnight, crying, and don’t know yourself what you are crying for. . . .”

“We must walk about the skating-ground before it gets dark,” said the governor’s wife, who was bored with listening.  “Who’s coming with me?”

The governor’s wife went out and the whole company trooped out of the pavilion after her.  Only the governor, the bishop, and the mayor remained.

“Queen of Heaven! and what I went through when I was a shopboy in a fish-shop!” Yegor Ivanitch went on, flinging up his arms so that his fox-lined coat fell open.  “One would go out to the shop almost before it was light . . . by eight o’clock I was completely frozen, my face was blue, my fingers were stiff so that I could not fasten my buttons nor count the money.  One would stand in the cold, turn numb, and think, ’Lord, I shall have to stand like this right on till evening!’ By dinner-time my stomach was pinched and my heart was aching. . . .  Yes!  And I was not much better afterwards when I had a shop of my own.  The frost was intense and the shop was like a mouse-trap with draughts blowing in all directions; the coat I had on was, pardon me, mangy, as thin as paper, threadbare. . . .  One would be chilled through and through, half dazed, and turn as cruel as the frost oneself:  I would pull one by the ear so that I nearly pulled the ear off; I would smack another on the back of the head; I’d glare at a customer like a ruffian, a wild beast, and be ready to fleece him; and when I got home in the evening and ought to have gone to bed, I’d be ill-humoured and set upon my family, throwing it in their teeth that they were living upon me; I would make a row and carry on so that half a dozen policemen couldn’t have managed me.  The frost makes one spiteful and drives one to drink.”