it into the stewpan.  When at last it was ready, Anton laid the table, placing beside the dish a three-footed plated salt-cellar, blackened with age, and a cut glass decanter, with a round glass stopper in its narrow neck.  Then, in a kind of chant, he announced to Lavretsky that dinner was ready, and took his place behind his master’s chair, a napkin wound around his right hand, and a kind of air of the past, like the odor of cypress-wood hanging about him.  Lavretsky tasted the broth, and took the fowl out of it.  The bird’s skin was covered all over with round blisters, a thick tendon ran up each leg, and the flesh was as tough as wood, and had a flavor like that which pervades a laundry.  After dinner Lavretsky said that he would take tea if—­

“I will bring it in a moment,” broke in the old man, and he kept his promise.  A few pinches of tea were found rolled up in a scrap of red paper.  Also a small, but very zealous and noisy little samovar[A] was discovered, and some sugar in minute pieces, which looked as if they had been all but melted away.  Lavretsky drank his tea out of a large cup.  From his earliest childhood he remembered this cup, on which playing cards were painted, and from which only visitors were allowed to drink; and now he drank from it, like a visitor.

[Footnote A:  Urn.]

Towards the evening came the servants.  Lavretsky did not like to sleep in his aunt’s bed, so he had one made up for him in the dining-room.  After putting out the candle, he lay for a long time looking around him, and thinking what were not joyous thoughts.  He experienced the sensations which every one knows who has had to spend the night for the first time in a long uninhabited room.  He fancied that the darkness which pressed in upon him from all sides could not accustom itself to the new tenant—­that the very walls of the house were astonished at him.  At last he sighed, pulled the counterpane well over him, and went to sleep.  Anton remained on his legs long after every one else had gone to bed.  For some time he spoke in a whisper to Apraxia, sighing low at intervals, and three times he crossed himself.  The old servants had never expected that their master would settle down among them at Vasilievskoe, when he had such a fine estate, with a well-appointed manor-house close by.  They did not suspect what was really the truth, that Lavriki was repugnant to its owner, that it aroused in his mind too painful recollections.  After they had whispered to each other enough, Anton took a stick, and struck the watchman’s board, which had long hung silently by the barn.  Then he lay down in the open yard, without troubling himself about any covering for his white head.  The May night was calm and soothing, and the old man slept soundly.

XX.