e went to his own home,
Kovrinka, and there spent three weeks in solitude; then, as soon
as the roads were in good condition, he set off, driving in a
carriage, to visit Pesotsky, his former guardian, who had brought
him up, and was a horticulturist well known all over Russia. The
distance from Kovrinka to Borissovka was reckoned only a little
over fifty miles. To drive along a soft road in May in a comfortable
carriage with springs was a real pleasure.

Pesotsky had an immense house with columns and lions, off which the
stucco was peeling, and with a footman in swallow-tails at the
entrance. The old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and
severe, stretched for almost three-quarters of a mile to the river,
and there ended in a steep, precipitous clay bank, where pines grew
with bare roots that looked like shaggy paws; the water shone below
with an unfriendly gleam, and the peewits flew up with a plaintive
cry, and there one always felt that one must sit down and write a
ballad. But near the house itself, in the courtyard and orchard,
which together with the nurseries covered ninety acres, it was all
life and gaiety even in bad weather. Such marvellous roses, lilies,
camellias; such tulips of all possible shades, from glistening white
to sooty black--such a wealth of flowers, in fact, Kovrin had
never seen anywhere as at Pesotsky's. It was only the beginning of
spring, and the real glory of the flower-beds was still hidden away
in the hot-houses. But even the flowers along the avenues, and here
and there in the flower-beds, were enough to make one feel, as one
walked about the garden, as though one were in a realm of tender
colours, especially in the early morning when the dew was glistening
on every petal.

What was the decorative part of the garden, and what Pesotsky
contemptuously spoke of as rubbish, had at one time in his childhood
given Kovrin an impression of fairyland.

Every sort of caprice, of elaborate monstrosity and mockery at
Nature was here. There were espaliers of fruit-trees, a pear-tree
in the shape of a pyramidal poplar, spherical oaks and lime-trees,
an apple-tree in the shape of an umbrella, plum-trees trained into
arches, crests, candelabra, and even into the number 1862--the
year when Pesotsky first took up horticulture. One came across,
too, lovely, graceful trees with strong, straight stems like palms,
and it was only by looking intently that one could recognise these
trees as gooseb