‘What have you got in your head, my good friend? Who of us is immortal? For all you’re born a giant, even to you there’ll be an end in time.’
‘There will! oh, there will!’ Harlov assented and he looked downcast. ‘I’ve had a vision come to me in my dreams,’ he brought out at last.
‘What are you saying?’ my mother interrupted him.
‘A vision in my dreams,’ he repeated—‘I’m a seer of visions, you know!’
‘You!’
‘I. Didn’t you know it?’ Harlov sighed. ‘Well, so.… Over a week ago, madam, I lay down, on the very last day of eating meat before St. Peter’s fast-day; I lay down after dinner to rest a bit, well, and so I fell asleep, and dreamed a raven colt ran into the room to me. And this colt began sporting about and grinning. Black as a beetle was the raven colt.’ Harlov ceased.
‘Well?’ said my mother.
‘And all of a sudden this same colt turns round, and gives me a kick in the left elbow, right in the funny bone.… I waked up; my arm would not move nor my leg either. Well, thinks I, it’s paralysis; however, I worked them up and down, and got them to move again; only there were shooting pains in the joints a long time, and there are still. When I open my hand, the pains shoot through the joints.’
‘Why, Martin Petrovitch, you must have lain upon your arm somehow and crushed it.’