thoroughfare stretches to, and
traverses, a barren plain of scrub, and so reaches the pine plantation
belonging to the Monastery of St. Michael the Archangel where the
latter is lurking behind a screen of old red spruces of which the
denseness seems to prop the very heavens, and which on clear, sunny
days can be seen rising to mark the spot whence the monastery's
crosses, like the gilded birds of the forest of eternal silence,
scintillate a constant welcome.

At a distance of some ten houses before Zhitnaia Street debouches upon
the plain which I have mentioned there begin to diverge from the street
and to trend towards a ravine, and eventually to lose themselves in the
latter's recesses, the small, squat shanties with one or two windows
apiece which constitute the suburb of Tolmachikha. This suburb, it may
be said, had as its original founders the menials of a landowner named
Tolmachev--a landowner who, after emancipating his serfs some thirteen
years before all serfs were legally emancipated, [In the year 1861]
was, for his action, visited with such bitter revilement that, in dire
offence at the same, he ended by becoming an inmate of the monastery,
and there spending ten years under the vow of silence, until death
overtook him amid a peaceful obscurity born of the fact that the
authorities had forbidden his exhibition to pilgrims or strangers.

It is in the very cots originally apportioned to Tolmachev's menials,
at the time, fifty years ago, when those menials were converted into
citizens, that the present inhabitants of the suburb dwell. And never
have they been burnt out of those homes, although the same period has
seen all Buev save Zhitnaia Street consumed, and everywhere that one
may delve within the township one will be sure to come across
undestroyed hearthstones.

The suburb, as I have said, stands at the hither end and on the sloping
side of one of the arms of a deep, wooded ravine, with its windows
facing towards the ravine's yawning mouth, and affording a view direct
to the Mokrie (certain marshes beyond the Obericha) and the swampy
forest of firs into which the dim red sun declines. Further on, the
ravine trends across the plain, then bends round towards the western
side of the town, cats away the clayey soil with an appetite which each
spring increases, and which, carrying the soil down to the river, is
gradually clogging the river's flow, diverting the muddy water towards
the marshes, and converting