went in at the familiar gates and first turned along an avenue leading to a little stone summer-house which I had been fond of in my childhood.  In my opinion that round, heavy summer-house on its clumsy columns, which combined the romantic charm of an old tomb with the ungainliness of a Sobakevitch,* was the most poetical nook in the whole town.  It stood at the edge above the cliff, and from it there was a splendid view of the sea.

A character in Gogol’s _Dead Souls.—­Translator’s Note._

“I sat down on the seat, and, bending over the parapet, looked down.  A path ran from the summer-house along the steep, almost overhanging cliff, between the lumps of clay and tussocks of burdock.  Where it ended, far below on the sandy shore, low waves were languidly foaming and softly purring.  The sea was as majestic, as infinite, and as forbidding as seven years before when I left the high school and went from my native town to the capital; in the distance there was a dark streak of smoke—­a steamer was passing—­and except for this hardly visible and motionless streak and the sea-swallows that flitted over the water, there was nothing to give life to the monotonous view of sea and sky.  To right and left of the summer-house stretched uneven clay cliffs.

“You know that when a man in a melancholy mood is left tete-a-tete with the sea, or any landscape which seems to him grandiose, there is always, for some reason, mixed with melancholy, a conviction that he will live and die in obscurity, and he reflectively snatches up a pencil and hastens to write his name on the first thing that comes handy.  And that, I suppose, is why all convenient solitary nooks like my summer-house are always scrawled over in pencil or carved with penknives.  I remember as though it were to-day; looking at the parapet I read:  ‘Ivan Korolkov, May 16, 1876.’  Beside Korolkov some local dreamer had scribbled freely, adding: 

“’He stood on the desolate ocean’s strand,
While his soul was filled with imaginings grand.’

And his handwriting was dreamy, limp like wet silk.  An individual called Kross, probably an insignificant, little man, felt his unimportance so deeply that he gave full licence to his penknife and carved his name in deep letters an inch high.  I took a pencil out of my pocket mechanically, and I too scribbled on one of the columns.  All that is irrelevant, however. . .  You must forgive me —­I don’t know how to tell a story briefly.

“I was sad and a little bored.  Boredom, the stillness, and the purring of the sea gradually brought me to the line of thought we have been discussing.  At that period, towards the end of the ’seventies, it had begun to be fashionable with the public, and later, at the beginning of the ’eighties, it gradually passed from the general public into literature, science, and politics.  I was no more than twenty-six at the time, but I knew perfectly well that life was