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St. John’s eve.

No one could have recognized this village of ours a little over a hundred years ago:  a hamlet it was, the poorest kind of a hamlet.  Half a score of miserable izbas, unplastered, badly thatched, were scattered here and there about the fields.  There was not an inclosure or decent shed to shelter animals or wagons.  That was the way the wealthy lived; and if you had looked for our brothers, the poor,—­why, a hole in the ground,—­that was a cabin for you!  Only by the smoke could you tell that a God-created man lived there.  You ask why they lived so?  It was not entirely through poverty:  almost every one led a wandering, Cossack life, and gathered not a little plunder in foreign lands; it was rather because there was no reason for setting up a well-ordered khata (wooden house).  How many people were wandering all over the country,—­Crimeans, Poles, Lithuanians!  It was quite possible that their own countrymen might make a descent, and plunder everything.  Anything was possible.

In this hamlet a man, or rather a devil in human form, often made his appearance.  Why he came, and whence, no one knew.  He prowled about, got drunk, and suddenly disappeared as if into the air, and there was not a hint of his existence.  Then, again, behold, he seemed to have dropped from the sky, and went flying about the streets of the village, of which no trace now remains, and which was not more than a hundred paces from Dikanka.  He would collect together all the Cossacks he met; then there were songs, laughter, money in abundance, and vodka flowed like water. . . .  He would address the pretty girls, and give them ribbons, earrings, strings of beads,—­more than they knew what to do with.  It is true that the pretty girls rather hesitated about accepting his presents:  God knows, perhaps they had passed through unclean hands.  My grandfather’s aunt, who kept a tavern at that time, in which Basavriuk (as they called that devil-man) often had his carouses, said that no consideration on the face of the earth would have induced her to accept a gift from him.  And then, again, how avoid accepting?  Fear seized on every one when he knit his bristly brows, and gave a sidelong glance which might send your feet, God knows whither; but if you accept, then the next night some fiend from the swamp, with horns on his head, comes to call, and begins to squeeze your neck, when there is a string of beads upon it; or bite your finger, if there is a ring upon it; or drag you by the hair, if ribbons are braided in it.  God have mercy, then, on those who owned such gifts!  But here was the difficulty:  it was impossible to get rid of them; if you threw them into the water, the diabolical ring or necklace would skim along the surface, and into your hand.