Getting ahead of her, an empty, black, funereal catafalque whirled by; with two horses in harness, and two tied behind to the little rear columns.  The torch-bearers and grave-diggers, already drunk since morning, with red, brutish faces, with rusty opera hats on their heads, were sitting in a disorderly heap on their uniform liveries, on the reticular horse-blankets, on the mourning lanterns; and with rusty, hoarse voices were roaring out some incoherent song.  “They must be hurrying to a funeral procession; or, perhaps, have even finished it already,” reflected Lichonin; “merry fellows!” On the boulevard he came to a stop and sat down on a small wooden bench, painted green.  Two rows of mighty centenarian chestnuts went away into the distance, merging together somewhere afar into one straight green arrow.  The prickly large nuts were already hanging on the trees.  Lichonin suddenly recalled that at the very beginning of the spring he had been sitting on this very boulevard, and at this very same spot.  Then it had been a calm, gentle evening of smoky purple, soundlessly falling into slumber, just like a smiling, tired maiden.  Then the stalwart chestnuts, with their foliage—­broad at the bottom and narrow toward the top—­had been strewn all over with clusters of blossoms, growing with bright, rosy, thin cones straight to the sky; just as though some one by mistake had taken and fastened upon all the chestnuts, as upon lustres, pink Christmas-tree candles.  And suddenly, with extraordinary poignancy—­every man sooner or later passes through this zone of inner emotion—­ Lichonin felt, that here are the nuts ripening already, while then there had been little pink blossoming candles, and that there would be many more springs and many blossoms, but the one which had passed no one and nothing had the power to bring back.  Sadly gazing into the depths of the retreating dense alley, he suddenly noticed that sentimental tears were making his eyes smart.

He got up and went on farther, looking closely at everything that he met with an incessant, sharpened, and at the same time calm attention, just as though he were looking at the God-created world for the first time.  A gang of stone masons went past him on the pavement, and all of them were reflected in his inner vision with an exaggerated vividness and brilliance of colour, just as though on the frosted glass of a camera obscura.  The foreman, with a red beard, matted to one side, and with blue austere eyes; and a tremendous young fellow, whose left eye was swollen, and who had a spot of a dark-blue colour spreading from the forehead to the cheekbone and from the nose to the temple; and a young boy with a naive, country face, with a gaping mouth like a fledgling’s, weak, moist; and an old man who, having come late, was running after the gang at a funny, goat-like trot; and their clothes, soiled with lime, their aprons and their chisels—­all this flickered before him in an inanimate file—­a colourful, motley, but dead cinematographic film.