Vaninka

About the end of the reign of the Emperor Paul I-that is to say, towards the middle of the first year of the nineteenth cen- tury-just as four o'clock in the afternoon was sounding from the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, whose gilded vane over- looks the ramparts of the fortress, a crowd, composed of all sorts and conditions of people, began to gather in front of a house which belonged to General Count Tchermayloff, formerly military governor of a fair-sized town in the government of Pultava.