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An audience would mean the dissolution of the Duma, and this Nicholas feared would bring revolution. As is well known, by a record published by an American journalist, there suddenly appeared in the Duma the Ministers of War and Marine, General Shuvaiev and Admiral Grigorovitch. They announced that they had a statement to make. The representatives of the people held their breath in suspense.

But that same young gentleman, in the pea-green caftan, came from Poltava, bringing with him a little book, and, opening it in the middle, showed it to us. Thoma Grigorovitch was on the point of setting his spectacles astride of his nose, but recollected that he had forgotten to wind thread about them and stick them together with wax, so he passed it over to me.

We write mechanically, merely obeying the long-established arrangement in accordance with which some men go into the government service, others into trade, others write.... Grigorovitch and you think I am clever.

But the czar, whose signature he needed, was at the front. For the moment he was delayed. During this interval another sensation occurred. General Shuvaiev, Minister of War, and Admiral Grigorovitch, Minister of Marine, appeared in the Duma, and declared themselves on the side of the Duma and the people. This settled the fate of Sturmer.

As I understand nothing about reading and writing, and do not wear spectacles, I undertook to read it. I had not turned two leaves when all at once he caught me by the hand and stopped me. "Stop! tell me first what you are reading." I confess that I was a trifle stunned by such a question. "What! what am I reading, Thoma Grigorovitch? Why, your own words." "Who told you that they were my words?"

Perhaps I shall succeed in doing something, though time flies fast. Forgive my long letter and do not blame a man because, for the first time in his life, he has made bold to treat himself to the pleasure of writing to Grigorovitch. Send me your photograph, if possible. I am so overwhelmed with your kindness that I feel as though I should like to write a whole ream to you.

Literary society, students, Pleshtcheyev, young ladies, etc., were enthusiastic in their praises of my "Nervous Breakdown," but Grigorovitch is the only one who has noticed the description of the first snow. And so on, and so on.

Thoma Grigorovitch was on the point of setting his spectacles astride of his nose, but recollected that he had forgotten to wind thread about them, and stick them together with wax, so he passed it over to me. As I understand something about reading and writing, and do not wear spectacles, I undertook to read it.

Thoma Grigorovitch had a very strange sort of eccentricity: to the day of his death he never liked to tell the same thing twice. There were times when, if you asked him to relate a thing afresh, behold, he would interpolate new matter, or alter it so that it was impossible to recognize it.

There are portraits of Dickens and Schopenhauer and Fet as a young man on the walls, too, and the well-known group of writers of the Sovremennik circle in 1856, with Turgenieff, Ostrovsky, Gontcharof, Grigorovitch, Druzhinin, and my father, quite young still, without a beard, and in uniform.