Punin stood still and waved both hands at once. ‘In the highest degree, sir! in the high ... est de ... gree, I do!’ ‘And you don’t read Pushkin? You don’t like Pushkin?’ Punin again flung his hands up higher than his head. ‘Pushkin? Pushkin is the snake, lying hid in the grass, who is endowed with the note of the nightingale!’ While Punin and I talked like this, cautiously picking our way over the unevenly laid brick pavement of so-called ‘white-stoned’ Moscow--in which there is not one stone, and which is not white at all--Musa walked silently beside us on the side further from me. In speaking of her, I called her ‘your niece.’ Punin was silent for a little, scratched his head, and informed me in an undertone that he had called her so ... merely as a manner of speaking; that she was really no relation; that she was an orphan picked up and cared for by Baburin in the town of Voronezh; but that he, Punin, might well call her daughter, as he loved her no less than a real daughter. I had no doubt that, though Punin intentionally dropped his voice, Musa could hear all he said very well; and she was at once angry, and shy, and embarrassed; and the lights and shades chased each other over her face, and everything in it was slightly quivering, the eyelids and brows and lips and narrow nostrils. All this was very charming, and amusing, and queer. * * * * * But at last we reached the ‘modest nest.’ And modest it certainly was, the nest. It consisted of a small, one-storied house, that seemed almost sunk into the ground, with a slanting wooden roof, and four dingy windows in the front. The furniture of the rooms was of the poorest, and not over tidy, indeed. Between the windows and on the walls hung about a dozen tiny wooden cages containing larks, canaries, and siskins. ‘My subjects!’ Punin pronounced triumphantly, pointing his finger at them. We had hardly time to get in and look about us, Punin had hardly sent Musa for the samovar, when Baburin himself came in. He seemed to me to have aged much more than Punin, though his step was as firm as ever, and the expression of his face altogether was unchanged; but he had grown thin and bent, his cheeks were sunken, and his thick black shock of hair was sprinkled with grey. He did not recognise me, and showed no particular pleasure when Punin mentioned my name; he did not even smile with his eyes, he barely nodded; he asked--very carelessly and drily--whether my _granny_ were living--and that was all. ‘I’m not over-delighted at a visit from a nobleman,’ he seemed to say; ‘I don’t feel flattered by it.’ The republican was a republican still.