I see that ancient, truly noble steppe home as though it stood before me now.  Of one story, with a huge mezzanine,[29] erected at the beginning of the present century from wonderfully thick pine beams—­such beams were brought at that epoch from the Zhizdrin pine forests; there is no trace of them nowadays!—­it was very spacious and contained a multitude of rooms, which were decidedly low-ceiled and dark, it is true, and the windows were mere slits in the walls, for the sake of warmth.  As was proper, the offices and the house-serfs’ cottages surrounded the manor-house on all sides, and a park adjoined it, small but with fine fruit-trees, pellucid apples and seedless pears; for ten versts round about stretched out the flat, black-loam steppe.  There was no lofty object for the eye:  neither a tree nor a belfry; only here and there a windmill reared itself aloft with holes in its wings; it was a regular Sukhodol! (Dry Valley).  Inside the house the rooms were filled with ordinary, plain furniture; rather unusual was a verst-post which stood on a window-sill in the hall, and bore the following inscription: 

“If thou walkest 68 times around this hall,[30] thou wilt have gone a verst; if thou goest 87 times from the extreme corner of the drawing-room to the right corner of the billiard-room, thou wilt have gone a verst,”—­and so forth.  But what most impressed the guest who arrived for the first time was the great number of pictures hung on the walls, for the most part the work of so-called Italian masters:  ancient landscapes, and mythological and religious subjects.  But as all these pictures had turned very black, and had even become warped, all that met the eye was patches of flesh-colour, or a billowy red drapery on an invisible body—­or an arch which seemed suspended in the air, or a dishevelled tree with blue foliage, or the bosom of a nymph with a large nipple, like the cover of a soup-tureen; a sliced watermelon, with black seeds; a turban, with a feather above a horse’s head; or the gigantic, light-brown leg of some apostle or other, with a muscular calf and up-turned toes, suddenly protruded itself.  In the drawing-room, in the place of honour, hung a portrait of the Empress Katherine II, full length, a copy from Lampi’s well-known portrait—­the object of special reverence, one may say adoration, for the master of the house.  From the ceiling depended crystal chandeliers in bronze fittings, very small and very dusty.

Alexyei Sergyeitch himself was a very squat, pot-bellied, little old man, with a plump, but agreeable face all of one colour, with sunken lips and very vivacious little eyes beneath lofty eyebrows.  He brushed his scanty hair over the back of his head; it was only since the year 1812 that he had discarded powder.  Alexyei Sergyeitch always wore a grey “redingote” with three capes which fell over his shoulders, a striped waistcoat, chamois-leather breeches and dark-red morocco short boots with a heart-shaped cleft, and a tassel