“Her first husband had been a postmaster, and with him she was accustomed to pies and home-made wines, while with her second husband she did not get enough black bread; she began to pine away with this sort of life, and three years later she gave up her soul to God.  And I need hardly say that my brother never for one moment imagined that he was responsible for her death.  Money, like vodka, makes a man queer.  In our town there was a merchant who, before he died, ordered a plateful of honey and ate up all his money and lottery tickets with the honey, so that no one might get the benefit of it.  While I was inspecting cattle at a railway-station, a cattle-dealer fell under an engine and had his leg cut off.  We carried him into the waiting-room, the blood was flowing—­it was a horrible thing—­and he kept asking them to look for his leg and was very much worried about it; there were twenty roubles in the boot on the leg that had been cut off, and he was afraid they would be lost.”

“That’s a story from a different opera,” said Burkin.

“After his wife’s death,” Ivan Ivanovitch went on, after thinking for half a minute, “my brother began looking out for an estate for himself.  Of course, you may look about for five years and yet end by making a mistake, and buying something quite different from what you have dreamed of.  My brother Nikolay bought through an agent a mortgaged estate of three hundred and thirty acres, with a house for the family, with servants’ quarters, with a park, but with no orchard, no gooseberry-bushes, and no duck-pond; there was a river, but the water in it was the colour of coffee, because on one side of the estate there was a brickyard and on the other a factory for burning bones.  But Nikolay Ivanovitch did not grieve much; he ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes, planted them, and began living as a country gentleman.

“Last year I went to pay him a visit.  I thought I would go and see what it was like.  In his letters my brother called his estate ’Tchumbaroklov Waste, alias Himalaiskoe.’  I reached ‘alias Himalaiskoe’ in the afternoon.  It was hot.  Everywhere there were ditches, fences, hedges, fir-trees planted in rows, and there was no knowing how to get to the yard, where to put one’s horse.  I went up to the house, and was met by a fat red dog that looked like a pig.  It wanted to bark, but it was too lazy.  The cook, a fat, barefooted woman, came out of the kitchen, and she, too, looked like a pig, and said that her master was resting after dinner.  I went in to see my brother.  He was sitting up in bed with a quilt over his legs; he had grown older, fatter, wrinkled; his cheeks, his nose, and his mouth all stuck out—­he looked as though he might begin grunting into the quilt at any moment.

“We embraced each other, and shed tears of joy and of sadness at the thought that we had once been young and now were both grey-headed and near the grave.  He dressed, and led me out to show me the estate.