hang upon the walls.  A piano, on which the count sometimes plays, and a large table complete the furniture.  Everything in the house is severely simple.  If I take the liberty of going into these details, it is in the interest of justice.  The house has been described in print —­from imagination, it would seem—­as “a castle luxuriously furnished,” and the count has been reproached with it.  Cheap as the furniture is, he grumbled at it when it was purchased; he grumbles at it still, and to me spoke of it as “sinful luxury.”  But then he cannot be regarded a fair judge of what constitutes luxury.

The whole house, outside and in, is modest in the extreme.  The park with its avenues of lindens, which were in full bloom during our visit, the ponds and lawns and forest, must have been superb in the time of his grandfather, and even of his mother, from whom he inherited it.  A grove and thicket now occupy the site of the former manor, and screen the view of each wing from the other.  Vegetable gardens and berry patches lie near at hand, and beds of brilliant but not rare flowers enliven the immediate vicinity of the house.

The estate is large and fertile, though it does not lie in the famous “black-earth zone.”  This begins a few miles south of it.

Plain wholesome food, simple dress, an open-air life without fixed programme, were what we found.  In the morning, after drinking tea or coffee, with bread and butter, in the hall, we usually strolled through the lovely forest, filled with flowers and perfumes, to the little river about a mile distant, for a bath.  The unpainted board bath-house had seats running along the walls, and steps leading down into the water.  A framework supporting thick screens of golden rye straw extended far out over the stream.  A door upstream swung open at will for ambitious swimmers.  It was a solitary spot.  The peasant girls pitching hay in the meadows beyond with three-pronged boughs stripped of their leaves were the only persons we ever saw.  Clad in their best scarlet cotton sarafani and head kerchiefs, they added greatly to the beauty of the landscape.  Haying is such easy work compared to the rest of the summer labors, that the best gowns are donned as for a festival.

If the boys got ahead of us on those hot mornings, when we had dispensed with every article of clothing not absolutely necessary, we lay in the shadow of the fragrant birches at the top of the hill on the soft, short sward, which seems in Russia to grow as thick in dense forests as in open glades, and waited until they could tear themselves from the cool embrace of the stream.  Then we went in, great and small, but with no bathing-dress.  The use of such a garment on such an occasion would be regarded as a sign that one was afflicted with some bodily defect which one was anxious to conceal.  By the time we had refreshed ourselves and rambled back, searching for early mushrooms through the forest or the great