and put up with much, had faced privation, had struggled like a fish on the ice; but the idea of returning to his own country never left him among all the hardships he endured; it was this dream alone that sustained him.  But fate did not see fit to grant him this last and first happiness:  at fifty, broken-down in health and prematurely aged, he drifted to the town of O——­, and remained there for good, having now lost once for all every hope of leaving Russia, which he detested.  He gained his poor livelihood somehow by lessons.  Lemm’s exterior was not prepossessing.  He was short and bent, with crooked shoulders, and contracted chest, with large flat feet, and bluish white nails on the gnarled bony fingers of his sinewy red hands.  He had a wrinkled face, sunken cheeks, and compressed lips, which he was for ever twitching and biting; and this, together with his habitual taciturnity, produced an impression almost sinister.  His grey hair hung in tufts on his low brow; like smouldering embers, his little set eyes glowed with dull fire.  He moved painfully, at every step swinging his ungainly body forward.  Some of his movements recalled the clumsy actions of an owl in a cage when it feels that it is being looked at, but itself can hardly see out of its great yellow eyes timorously and drowsily blinking.  Pitiless, prolonged sorrow had laid its indelible stamp on the poor musician; it had disfigured and deformed his person, by no means attractive to begin with.  But any one who was able to get over the first impression would have discerned something good, and honest, and out of the common in this half-shattered creature.  A devoted admirer of Bach and Handel, a master of his art, gifted with a lively imagination and that boldness of conception which is only vouchsafed to the German race, Lemm might, in time—­who knows?—­have taken rank with the great composers of his fatherland, had his life been different; but he was born under an unlucky star!  He had written much in his life, and it had not been granted to him to see one of his compositions produced; he did not know how to set about things in the right way, to gain favour in the right place, and to make a push at the right moment.  A long, long time ago, his one friend and admirer, also a German and also poor, had published two of Lemm’s sonatas at his own expense—­the whole edition remained on the shelves of the music-shops; they disappeared without a trace, as though they had been thrown into a river by night.  At last Lemm had renounced everything; the years too did their work; his mind had grown hard and stiff, as his fingers had stiffened.  He lived alone in a little cottage not far from the Kalitin’s house, with an old cook he had taken out of the poorhouse (he had never married).  He took long walks, and read the Bible and the Protestant version of the Psalms, and Shakespeare in Schlegel’s translation.  He had composed nothing for a long time; but apparently, Lisa, his best pupil, had been able to inspire him; he had written