About forty versts from our village there dwelt, many years ago, the great-uncle of my mother, a retired Sergeant of the Guards and a fairly wealthy landed proprietor, Alexyei Sergyeitch Telyegin, on his ancestral estate, Sukhodol. He never went anywhere himself, and therefore did not visit us; but I was sent to pay my respects to him a couple of times a year, at first with my governor, and later on alone. Alexyei Sergyeitch always received me very cordially, and I spent three or four days with him. He was already an old man when I made his acquaintance; I remember that I was twelve years old at my first visit, and he was already over seventy. He had been born under the Empress Elizabeth, in the last year of her reign. He lived alone with his wife, Malanya Pavlovna; she was ten years younger than he. They had had two daughters who had been married long before, and rarely visited Sukhodol; there had been quarrels between them and their parents,[28] and Alexyei Sergyeitch hardly ever mentioned them. I see that ancient, truly noble steppe home as though it stood before me now. Of one story, with a huge mezzanine,[29] erected at the beginning of the present century from wonderfully thick pine beams--such beams were brought at that epoch from the Zhizdrin pine forests; there is no trace of them nowadays!--it was very spacious and contained a multitude of rooms, which were decidedly low-ceiled and dark, it is true, and the windows were mere slits in the walls, for the sake of warmth. As was proper, the offices and the house-serfs' cottages surrounded the manor-house on all sides, and a park adjoined it, small but with fine fruit-trees, pellucid apples and seedless pears; for ten versts round about stretched out the flat, black-loam steppe. There was no lofty object for the eye: neither a tree nor a belfry; only here and there a windmill reared itself aloft with holes in its wings; it was a regular Sukhodol! (Dry Valley). Inside the house the rooms were filled with ordinary, plain furniture; rather unusual was a verst-post which stood on a window-sill in the hall, and bore the following inscription: