Demons

Is it some witch's wedding day?

, "Demons"

Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them leave. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.

When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they fled, and told it in the city and in the country. Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told them how he who had been possessed with demons was healed.

Luke 8:3236 (rsv)

In setting out to describe the recent and very strange events that took place in our town, hitherto not remarkable for anything, I am forced, for want of skill, to begin somewhat far back–namely, with some biographical details concerning the talented and much esteemed Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Let these details serve merely as an introduction to the chronicle presented here, while the story itself, which I am intending to relate, still lies ahead.

I will say straight off: Stepan Trofimovich constantly played a certain special and, so to speak, civic role among us, and loved this role to the point of passion–so much so that it even seems to me he would have been unable to live without it. Not that I equate him with a stage actor: God forbid, particularly as I happen to respect him. It could all have been a matter of habit, or, better, of a ceaseless and noble disposition, from childhood on, towards a pleasant dream of his beautiful civic stance. He was, for example, greatly enamored of his position as a "persecuted" man and, so to speak, an "exile." There is a sort of classical luster to these two little words that seduced him once and for all, and, later raising him gradually in his own estimation over the course of so many years, brought him finally to some sort of pedestal, rather lofty and gratifying to his vanity. In a satirical English novel of the last century, a certain Gulliver, having returned from the land of the Lilliputians, where people were only some three inches tall, had grown so accustomed to considering himself a giant among them that even when walking in the streets of London, he could not help shouting at passersby and carriages to move aside and take care that he not somehow crush them, imagining that he was still a giant and they were little. For which people laughed at him and abused him, and rude coachmen even struck the giant with their whips–but was that fair? What will habit not do to a man? Habit brought Stepan Trofimovich to much the same thing, but in a still more innocent and inoffensive form, if one may put it so, for he was a most excellent man.