He poured out wine for himself and us, emptied his glass, stroked
his broad chest with his open hands, and went on, addressing himself
more to me than to the student.

"It was in the year 187--, soon after the war, and when I had just
left the University. I was going to the Caucasus, and on the way
stopped for five days in the seaside town of N. I must tell you
that I was born and grew up in that town, and so there is nothing
odd in my thinking N. extraordinarily snug, cosy, and beautiful,
though for a man from Petersburg or Moscow, life in it would be as
dreary and comfortless as in any Tchuhloma or Kashira. With melancholy
I passed by the high school where I had been a pupil; with melancholy
I walked about the very familiar park, I made a melancholy attempt
to get a nearer look at people I had not seen for a long time--
all with the same melancholy.

"Among other things, I drove out one evening to the so-called
Quarantine. It was a small mangy copse in which, at some forgotten
time of plague, there really had been a quarantine station, and
which was now the resort of summer visitors. It was a drive of three
miles from the town along a good soft road. As one drove along one
saw on the left the blue sea, on the right the unending gloomy
steppe; there was plenty of air to breathe, and wide views for the
eyes to rest on. The copse itself lay on the seashore. Dismissing
my cabman, I 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