everything; it made its way even into the shade … and the birds one could hear! You’ve not forgotten, I expect, that birds are a passion of mine? The turtle-doves cooed unceasingly; from time to time there came the whistle of the oriole; the chaffinch uttered its sweet little refrain; the blackbirds quarrelled and twittered; the cuckoo called far away; suddenly, like a mad thing, the woodpecker uttered its shrill cry. I listened and listened to this subdued, mingled sound, and did not want to move, while my heart was full of something between languor and tenderness. And it’s not only the garden that has grown up: I am continually coming across sturdy, thick-set lads, whom I cannot recognise as the little boys I used to know in old days. Your favourite, Timosha, has turned into a Timofay, such as you could never imagine. You had fears in those days for his health, and predicted consumption; but now you should just see his huge, red hands, as they stick out from the narrow sleeves of his nankeen coat, and the stout rounded muscles that stand out all over him! He has a neck like a bull’s, and a head all over tight, fair curls--a regular Farnese Hercules. His face, though, has changed less than the others’; it is not even much larger in circumference, and the good-humoured, ‘gaping’--as you used to say--smile has remained the same. I have taken him to be my valet; I got rid of my Petersburg fellow at Moscow; he was really too fond of putting me to shame, and making me feel the superiority of his Petersburg manners. Of my dogs I have not found one; they have all passed away. Nefka lived longer than any of them--and she did not live till my return, as Argos lived till the return of Ulysses; she was not fated to look once more with her lustreless eyes on her master and companion in the chase. But Shavka is all right, and barks as hoarsely as ever, and has one ear torn just the same, and burrs sticking to his tail,--all just as it should be. I have taken up my abode in what was your room. It is true the sun beats down upon it, and there are a lot of flies in it; but there is less of the smell of the old house in it than in the other rooms. It’s a queer thing; that musty, rather sour, faint smell has a powerful effect on my imagination; I don’t mean that it’s disagreeable to me, quite the contrary, but it produces melancholy, and, at last, depression. I am very fond, just as you are, of podgy old chests with brass plates, white armchairs with oval backs, and crooked legs, fly-blown glass lustres, with a big egg of lilac tinsel in the centre--of all sorts of ancestral furniture, in fact. But I can’t stand seeing it all continually; a sort of agitated dejection (it is just that) takes possession of me. In the room where I have established myself, the furniture is of the most ordinary, home-made description. I have left, though, in the corner, a long narrow set of shelves, on which there is