blue sky, on which the clouds floated tranquilly, seeming as if they knew why and whither they were floating.  In the other parts of the world, at that very moment, life was seething, noisily bestirring itself.  Here the same life flowed silently along, like water over meadow grass.  It was late in the evening before Lavretsky could tear himself away from the contemplation of this life so quietly welling forth—­so tranquilly flowing past.  Sorrow for the past melted away in his mind as the snow melts in spring; but, strange to say, never had the love of home exercised so strong or so profound an influence upon him.

XXI.

In the course of a fortnight Lavretsky succeeded in setting Glafira Petrovna’s little house in order, and in trimming the court-yard and the garden.  Its stable became stocked with horses; comfortable furniture was brought to it from Lavriki; and the town supplied it with wine, and with books and newspapers.  In short, Lavretsky provided himself with every thing he wanted, and began to lead a life which was neither exactly that of an ordinary landed proprietor, nor exactly that of a regular hermit.  His days passed by in uniform regularity, but he never found them dull, although he had no visitors.  He occupied himself assiduously and attentively with the management of his estate; he rode about the neighborhood, and he read.  But he read little.  He preferred listening to old Anton’s stories.

Lavretsky generally sat at the window, over a pipe and a cup of cold tea.  Anton would stand at the door, his hands crossed behind his back, and would begin a deliberate narrative about old times, those fabulous times when oats and rye were sold, not By measure, but in large sacks, and for two or three roubles the sack; when on all sides, right up to the town, there stretched impenetrable forests and untouched steppes.  “But now,” grumbled the old man, over whose head eighty years had already passed, “everything has been so cut down and ploughed up that one can’t drive anywhere.”  Anton would talk also at great length about his late mistress, Glafira Petrovna, saying how judicious and economical she was, how a certain gentleman, one of her young neighbors, had tried to gain her good graces for a time, and had begun to pay her frequent visits; and how in his honor she had deigned even to put on her gala-day cap with massacas ribbons, and her yellow dress made of tru-tru-levantine; but how, a little later, having become angry with her neighbor, that gentleman, on account of his indiscreet question, “I suppose, madam, you doubtless have a good sum of money in hand?” she told her servants never to let him enter her house again—­and how she then ordered that, after her death, every thing, even to the smallest rag, should be handed over to Lavretsky.  And, in reality, Lavretsky found his aunt’s property quite intact, even down to the gala-day cap with the massacas ribbons, and the yellow dress of tru-tru-levantine.