I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the travels of my childhood.  It set, clear and red, dipping into the snow in full view as if it were setting on the sea.  It was twenty-three years since I had seen the sun set over that land; and we drove on in the darkness which fell swiftly upon the livid expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a white earth joining a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps of trees about a village of the Ukrainian plain.  A cottage or two glided by, a low interminable wall and then, glimmering and winking through a screen of fir-trees, the lights of the master’s house.

That very evening the wandering Ms. of “Almayer’s Folly” was unpacked and unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my room, the guest-room which had been, I was informed in an affectedly careless tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years or so.  It attracted no attention from the affectionate presence hovering round the son of the favourite sister.

“You won’t have many hours to yourself while you are staying with me, brother,” he said—­this form of address borrowed from the speech of our peasants being the usual expression of the highest good humour in a moment of affectionate elation.  “I shall be always coming in for a chat.”

As a matter of fact we had the whole house to chat in, and were everlastingly intruding upon each other.  I invaded the retirement of his study where the principal feature was a colossal silver inkstand presented to him on his fiftieth year by a subscription of all his wards then living.  He had been guardian of many orphans of land-owning families from the three southern provinces—­ever since the year 1860.  Some of them had been my schoolfellows and playmates, but not one of them, girls or boys, that I know of has ever written a novel.  One or two were older than myself—­considerably older, too.  One of them, a visitor I remember in my early years, was the man who first put me on horseback, and his four-horse bachelor turnout, his perfect horsemanship and general skill in manly exercises was one of my earliest admirations.  I seem to remember my mother looking on from a colonnade in front of the dining-room windows as I was lifted upon the pony, held, for all I know, by the very Joseph—­the groom attached specially to my grandmother’s service—­who died of cholera.  It was certainly a young man in a dark blue, tailless coat and huge Cossack trousers, that being the livery of the men about the stables.  It must have been in 1864, but reckoning by another mode of calculating time, it was certainly in the year in which my mother obtained permission to travel south and visit her family, from the exile into which she had followed my father.  For that, too, she had had to ask permission, and I know that one of the conditions of that favour was that she should be treated exactly as a condemned exile herself.  Yet a couple of years later, in memory of her eldest brother who had served in the Guards and dying early left hosts of friends and a loved memory in the great world of St. Petersburg, some influential personages procured for her this permission—­it was officially called the “Highest Grace”—­of a three months’ leave from exile.