“Oo-oo-oo-oo!” sang the storm in the loft, and something outside slammed viciously, probably the signboard on the hut.  “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”

“You can do as you please, but I have no desire to stay here,” said Startchenko, getting up.  “It’s not six yet, it’s too early to go to bed; I am off.  Von Taunitz lives not far from here, only a couple of miles from Syrnya.  I shall go to see him and spend the evening there.  Constable, run and tell my coachman not to take the horses out.  And what are you going to do?” he asked Lyzhin.

“I don’t know; I expect I shall go to sleep.”

The doctor wrapped himself in his fur coat and went out.  Lyzhin could hear him talking to the coachman and the bells beginning to quiver on the frozen horses.  He drove off.

“It is not nice for you, sir, to spend the night in here,” said the constable; “come into the other room.  It’s dirty, but for one night it won’t matter.  I’ll get a samovar from a peasant and heat it directly.  I’ll heap up some hay for you, and then you go to sleep, and God bless you, your honor.”

A little later the examining magistrate was sitting in the kitchen drinking tea, while Loshadin, the constable, was standing at the door talking.  He was an old man about sixty, short and very thin, bent and white, with a naive smile on his face and watery eyes, and he kept smacking with his lips as though he were sucking a sweetmeat.  He was wearing a short sheepskin coat and high felt boots, and held his stick in his hands all the time.  The youth of the examining magistrate aroused his compassion, and that was probably why he addressed him familiarly.

“The elder gave orders that he was to be informed when the police superintendent or the examining magistrate came,” he said, “so I suppose I must go now....  It’s nearly three miles to the volost, and the storm, the snowdrifts, are something terrible—­maybe one won’t get there before midnight.  Ough! how the wind roars!”

“I don’t need the elder,” said Lyzhin.  “There is nothing for him to do here.”

He looked at the old man with curiosity, and asked: 

“Tell me, grandfather, how many years have you been constable?”

“How many?  Why, thirty years.  Five years after the Freedom I began going as constable, that’s how I reckon it.  And from that time I have been going every day since.  Other people have holidays, but I am always going.  When it’s Easter and the church bells are ringing and Christ has risen, I still go about with my bag—­to the treasury, to the post, to the police superintendent’s lodgings, to the rural captain, to the tax inspector, to the municipal office, to the gentry, to the peasants, to all orthodox Christians.  I carry parcels, notices, tax papers, letters, forms of different sorts, circulars, and to be sure, kind gentleman, there are all sorts of forms nowadays, so as to note down the numbers—­yellow, white, and red—­and every gentleman or priest or well-to-do peasant must