I am homesick for Venice and Florence too, and am ready to climb Vesuvius again; Bologna has been effaced from my memory and grown dim. As for Nice and Paris, when I recall them “I look on my life with loathing.” In the last number of _The Messenger of Foreign Literature_ there is a story by Ouida, translated from the English by our Mihail. Why don’t I know foreign languages? It seems to me I could translate magnificently. When I read anyone else’s translation I keep altering and transposing the words in my brain, and the result is something light, ethereal, like lacework. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays I write my Sahalin book, on the other days, except Sunday, my novel, and on Sundays, short stories. I work with zest. The weather has been superb every day; the site of our summer villa is dry and healthy. There is a lot of woodland. There are a lot of fish and crayfish in the Oka. I see the trains and the steamers. Altogether if it were not for being somewhat cramped I should be very very much pleased with it. * * * * * I don’t intend to get married. I should like to be a little bald old man sitting at a big table in a fine study.... ALEXIN, May 13, 1891. I am going to write you a Christmas story--that’s certain. Two, indeed, if you like. I sit and write and write ...; at last I have set to work. I am only sorry that my cursed teeth are aching and my stomach is out of order. I am a dilatory but productive author. By the time I am forty I shall have hundreds of volumes, so that I can open a bookshop with nothing but my own works. To have a lot of books and to have nothing else is a horrible disgrace. My dear friend, haven’t you in your library Tagantsev’s “Criminal Law”? If you have, couldn’t you send it me? I would buy it, but I am now “a poor relation”--a beggar and as poor as Sidor’s goat. Would you telephone to your shop, too, to send me, on account of favours to come, two books: “The Laws relating to Exiles,” and “The Laws relating to Persons under Police Control.” Don’t imagine that I want to become a procurator; I want these works for my Sahalin book. I am going to direct my attack chiefly against life sentences, in which I see the root of all the evils; and against the laws dealing with exiles, which are fearfully out of date and contradictory. TO L. S. MIZINOV. ALEXIN, May 17, 1891. Golden, mother-of-pearl, and _fil d’Ecosse_ Lika! The mongoose ran away the day before yesterday, and will never come back again. It is dead. That is the first thing.