"What a night!" he said to me with even more than his usual tenderness and pensive gladness, meeting me in the doorway. "It is so dull here! The only excitement is when the telephone rings and Sophie Pavlovna asks what I am doing, and I answer: 'I am catching mice.' Come, let us drive to Orianda. I don't care a hang if I do catch cold!" The night was warm and still, with a bright moon, light clouds, and a few stars in the deep blue sky. The carriage rolled softly along the white road, and, soothed by the stillness of the night, we sat silent looking at the sea glowing a dim gold.... Then came the forest cobwebbed over with shadows, but already spring-like and beautiful.... Black troops of giant cypresses rose majestically into the sky. We stopped the carriage and walked beneath them, past the ruins of the castle, which were pale blue in the moonlight. Chekhov suddenly said to me: "Do you know for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" I asked. "Seven and a half, then." "No," I said. "Poetry lives long, and the longer it lives the better it becomes--like wine." He said nothing, but when we had sat down on a bench from which we could see the sea shining in the moonlight, he took off his glasses and said, looking at me with his kind, tired eyes: "Poets, sir, are those who use such phrases as 'the silvery distance,' 'accord,' or 'onward, onward, to the fight with the powers of darkness'!" "You are sad to-night, Anton Pavlovitch," I said, looking at his kind and beautiful face, pale in the moonlight. He was thoughtfully digging up little pebbles with the end of his stick, with his eyes on the ground. But when I said that he was sad, he looked across at me, humorously. "It is you who are sad," he answered. "You are sad because you have spent such a lot on the cab." Then he added gravely: "Yes, I shall only be read for another seven years; and I shall live for less--perhaps for six. But don't go and tell that to the newspaper reporters." He was wrong there: he did not live for six years.... He died peacefully without suffering in the stillness and beauty of a summer's dawn which he had always loved. When he was dead a look of happiness came upon his face, and it looked like the face of a very young man. There came to my mind the words of Leconte de Lisle: Moi, je l'envie, au fond du tombeau calme et noir D'être affranchi de vivre et de ne plus savoir La honte de penser et l'horreur d'être un homme! [ Transcriber's Note: The following is a list of corrections made to the original. The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one. respect; no one should dare to shout at him or humilate him personally, respect; no one should dare to shout at him or humiliate him personally, began at once to speak of it with enthusiaism, completely uninterested, began at once to speak of it with enthusiasm, completely uninterested, you struck!" you struck!'"