What was the meaning of this? Could it be.... With this word the manuscript came to an end. CLARA MILITCH A TALE (1882) I In the spring of 1878 there lived in Moscow, in a small wooden house on Shabolovka Street, a young man five-and-twenty years of age, Yakoff Aratoff by name. With him lived his aunt, an old maid, over fifty years of age, his father's sister, Platonida Ivanovna. She managed his housekeeping and took charge of his expenditures, of which Aratoff was utterly incapable. He had no other relations. Several years before, his father, a petty and not wealthy noble of the T---- government, had removed to Moscow, together with him and Platonida Ivanovna who, by the way, was always called Platosha; and her nephew called her so too. When he quitted the country where all of them had constantly dwelt hitherto, old Aratoff had settled in the capital with the object of placing his son in the university, for which he had himself prepared him; he purchased for a trifling sum a small house on one of the remote streets, and installed himself therein with all his books and "preparations." And of books and preparations he had many, for he was a man not devoid of learning ... "a supernatural eccentric," according to the words of his neighbours. He even bore among them the reputation of a magician: he had even received the nickname of "the insect-observer." He busied himself with chemistry, mineralogy, entomology, botany, and medicine; he treated voluntary patients with herbs and metallic powders of his own concoction, after the method of Paracelsus. With those same powders he had sent into the grave his young, pretty, but already too delicate wife, whom he had passionately loved, and by whom he had had an only son. With those same metallic powders he had wrought considerable havoc with the health of his son also, which, on the contrary, he had wished to reinforce, as he detected in his organisation anaemia and a tendency to consumption inherited from his mother. The title of "magician" he had acquired, among other things, from the fact that he considered himself a great-grandson--not in the direct line, of course--of the famous Bruce, in whose honour he had named his son Yakoff.[51] He was the sort of man who is called "very good-natured," but of a melancholy temperament, fussy, and timid, with a predilection for everything that was mysterious or mystical.... "Ah!" uttered in a half-whisper was his customary exclamation; and he died with that exclamation on his lips, two years after his removal to Moscow.