VASSILY GUSKOV,
Brigadier and cavalier.’
Several years later I paid another visit to my friend’s little place.... Vassily Fomitch had long been dead; he died soon after I made his acquaintance. Cucumber was still flourishing. He conducted me to the tomb of Agrafena Ivanovna. An iron railing enclosed a large slab with a detailed and enthusiastically laudatory epitaph on the deceased woman; and there, beside it, as it were at her feet, could be seen a little mound with a slanting cross on it; the servant of God, the brigadier and cavalier, Vassily Guskov, lay under this mound.... His ashes found rest at last beside the ashes of the creature he had loved with such unbounded, almost undying, love.