ing-room, the blood was
flowing--it was a horrible thing--and he kept asking them to look for
his leg and was very much worried about it; there were twenty roubles in
the boot on the leg that had been cut off, and he was afraid they would
be lost."

"That's a story from a different opera," said Burkin.

"After his wife's death," Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after thinking for
half a minute, "my brother began looking out for an estate for himself.
Of course, you may look about for five years and yet end by making a
mistake, and buying something quite different from what you have dreamed
of. My brother Nikolay bought through an agent a mortgaged estate
of three hundred and thirty acres, with a house for the family,
with servants' quarters, with a park, but with no orchard, no
gooseberry-bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but the water in
it was the colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was
a brickyard and on the other a factory for burning bones. But Nikolay
Ivanovitch did not grieve much; he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes,
planted them, and began living as a country gentleman.

"Last year I went to pay him a visit. I thought I would go and see what
it was like. In his letters my brother called his estate 'Tchumbaroklov
Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.' I reached 'alias Himalaiskoe' in the
afternoon. It was hot. Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges,
fir-trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the
yard, where to put one's horse. I went up to the house, and was met by
a fat red dog that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but it was too
lazy. The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and
she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after
dinner. I went in to see my brother. He was sitting up in bed with a
quilt over his legs; he had grown older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks,
his nose, and his mouth all stuck out--he looked as though he might
begin grunting into the quilt at any moment.

"We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at the
thought that we had once been young and now were both grey-headed and
near the grave. He dressed, and led me out to show me the estate.

"'Well, how are you getting on here?' I asked.

"'Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.'

"He was no more a poor timid clerk, but a real landowner, a gentleman.
He was already accustomed to it, had grown used to it, and liked