and, like flowery meadows uniting together into one wide, wide world, all these various impressions ended in a mere blank, and he fell asleep. He slept for a long time without dreaming, but just before dawn visions again appeared He imagined that he was standing before the candle-chest, and Tikhinov's old woman asked of him a penny candle against the feast. He would have taken a candle and given it to her, but his hands would not lift up, but remained fast fixed in his pockets. He wanted to go round the chest, but his legs would not move, and his new brightly polished goloshes grew into the stone floor, and he could not lift them up, nor could he draw his feet out of them. And suddenly the candle-chest was no longer the candle-chest, but a bed, and Vasily Andreich saw himself lying prone on the candle-chest that was really his own bed in his own house. There he lay upon his bed, and could not stand up, and he had to stand up because the magistrate, Ivan Matvyeich, was just coming to see him, and he had to go with Ivan Matvyeich on business about some wood or other, or to adjust Brownie's harness, he was not sure which. And he kept on asking his wife, "What! hasn't he called?" "Nay," she said, "he has not called." And then he heard someone passing by the door. "Here he is—it must be he." "No, he has passed by." "Then it's Mikolama, eh? Or is there nobody at all?" "There's nobody." And there he lay on his bed, and all the time he could not get up, and he was expecting something, and this expectation was both grievous and pleasant at the same time. And at last the pleasurable feeling got the upper hand,
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