rt and smells, and gave up her whole mind and soul
to them. We always had setters, harriers, and borzois, and the whole
kennel, often very numerous, was under Agafya Mikhailovna's management,
with some boy or other to help her, usually one as clumsy and stupid as
could be found.

There are many interesting recollections bound up with the memory of
this intelligent and original woman. Most of them are associated in
my mind with my father's stories about her. He could always catch and
unravel any interesting psychological trait, and these traits, which he
would mention incidentally, stuck firmly in my mind. He used to tell,
for instance, how Agafya Mikhailovna complained to him of sleeplessness.

"Ever since I can remember her, she has suffered from 'a birch-tree
growing inside me from my belly up; it presses against my chest, and
prevents my breathing.'

"She complains of her sleeplessness and the birch-tree and says: 'There
I lay all alone and all quiet, only the clock ticking on the wall: "Who
are you? What are you? Who are you? What are you?" And I began to think:
"Who am I? What am I?" and so I spent the whole night thinking about
it.'

"Why, imagine this is Socrates! 'Know thyself,'" said my father, telling
the story with great enthusiasm.

In the summer-time my mother's brother, Styopa (Stephen Behrs), who was
studying at the time in the school of jurisprudence, used to come and
stay with us. In the autumn he used to go wolf-hunting with my father
and us, with the borzois, and Agafya Mikhailovna loved him for that.

Styopa's examination was in the spring. Agafya Mikhailovna knew about it
and anxiously waited for the news of whether he had got through.

Once she put up a candle before the eikon and prayed that Styopa might
pass. But at that moment she remembered that her borzois had got out and
had not come back to the kennels again.

"Saints in heaven! they'll get into some place and worry the cattle and
do a mischief!" she cried. "'Lord, let my candle burn for the dogs
to come back quick, and I'll buy another for Stepan Andreyevitch.' No
sooner had I said this to myself than I heard the dogs in the porch
rattling their collars. Thank God! they were back. That's what prayer
can do."

Another favorite of Agafya Mikhailovna was a young man, Misha
Stakhovitch, who often stayed with us.

"See what you have been and done to me, little Countess!" she said
reproachfully to my sister Tanya: "you've introduced m