--"Listen, travel third class as often as possible"--he advised--"I am sorry that illness prevents me from traveling third. There you will sometimes hear remarkably interesting things." He also wondered at those authors who for years on end see nothing but the next door house from the windows of their Petersburg flats. And often he said with a shade of impatience: --"I cannot understand why you--young, healthy, and free--don't go, for instance, to Australia (Australia for some reason was his favorite part of the world), or to Siberia. As soon as I am better, I shall certainly go to Siberia. I was there when I went to Saghalien. You cannot imagine, my dear fellow, what a wonderful country it is. It is quite different. You know, I am convinced Siberia will some day sever herself completely from Russia, just as America severed herself from her motherland. You must, must go there without fail...." "Why don't you write a play?"--he would sometimes ask. "Do write one, really. Every writer must write at least four plays." But he would confess now and then, that the dramatic form is losing its interest now. "The drama must either degenerate completely, or take a completely new form"--he said. "We cannot even imagine what the theatre will be like in a hundred years." There were some little inconsistencies in Anton Pavlovitch which were particularly attractive in him and had at the same time a deep inner significance. This was once the case with regard to note-books. Chekhov had just strongly advised us not to have recourse to them for help but to rely wholly on our memory and imagination. "The big things will remain"--he argued--"and the details you can always invent or find." But then, an hour later, one of the company, who had been for a year on the stage, began to talk of his theatrical impressions and incidentally mentioned this case. A rehearsal was taking place in the theatre of a tiny provincial town. The "young lover" paced the stage in a hat and check trousers, with his hands in his pockets, showing off before a casual public which had straggled into the theatre. The "ingenue," his mistress, who was also on the stage, said to him: "Sasha, what was it you whistled yesterday from _Pagliacci_? Do please whistle it again." The "young lover" turned to her, and looking her up and down with a devastating expression said in a fat, actor's voice: "Wha-at! Whistle on the stage? Would you whistle in church? Then know that the stage is the same as a church!" At the end of that story Anton Pavlovitch threw off his pince-nez, flung himself back in his chair, and began to laugh with his clear, ringing laughter. He immediately opened the drawer of his table to get his note-book. "Wait, wait, how did you say it? The stage is a temple?" ... And he put down the whole anecdote.