Just before her death, again, she expressed a wish that one of the gowns (a pink one) should be made into a robe de chambre for Woloda; that the other one (a many-coloured gown) should be made into a similar garment for myself; and that the shawl should go to Lubotshka.  As for the uniform, it was to devolve either to Woloda or to myself, according as the one or the other of us should first become an officer.  All the rest of her property (save only forty roubles, which she set aside for her commemorative rites and to defray the costs of her burial) was to pass to her brother, a person with whom, since he lived a dissipated life in a distant province, she had had no intercourse during her lifetime.  When, eventually, he arrived to claim the inheritance, and found that its sum-total only amounted to twenty-five roubles in notes, he refused to believe it, and declared that it was impossible that his sister-a woman who for sixty years had had sole charge in a wealthy house, as well as all her life had been penurious and averse to giving away even the smallest thing should have left no more:  yet it was a fact.

Though Natalia’s last illness lasted for two months, she bore her sufferings with truly Christian fortitude.  Never did she fret or complain, but, as usual, appealed continually to God.  An hour before the end came she made her final confession, received the Sacrament with quiet joy, and was accorded extreme unction.  Then she begged forgiveness of every one in the house for any wrong she might have done them, and requested the priest to send us word of the number of times she had blessed us for our love of her, as well as of how in her last moments she had implored our forgiveness if, in her ignorance, she had ever at any time given us offence.  “Yet a thief have I never been.  Never have I used so much as a piece of thread that was not my own.”  Such was the one quality which she valued in herself.

Dressed in the cap and gown prepared so long beforehand, and with her head resting, upon the cushion made for the purpose, she conversed with the priest up to the very last moment, until, suddenly, recollecting that she had left him nothing for the poor, she took out ten roubles, and asked him to distribute them in the parish.  Lastly she made the sign of the cross, lay down, and expired—­pronouncing with a smile of joy the name of the Almighty.

She quitted life without a pang, and, so far from fearing death, welcomed it as a blessing.  How often do we hear that said, and how seldom is it a reality!  Natalia Savishna had no reason to fear death for the simple reason that she died in a sure and certain faith and in strict obedience to the commands of the Gospel.  Her whole life had been one of pure, disinterested love, of utter self-negation.  Had her convictions been of a more enlightened order, her life directed to a higher aim, would that pure soul have been the more worthy of love and reverence?  She accomplished the highest and best achievement in this world:  she died without fear and without repining.