for a doctor, but casually, over a bottle of wine, he spoke to a
friend who was a doctor, and the latter advised him to spend the
spring and summer in the country. Very opportunely a long letter
came from Tanya Pesotsky, who asked him to come and stay with them
at Borissovka. And he made up his mind that he really must go.

To begin with--that was in April--he went to his own home,
Kovrinka, and there spent three weeks in solitude; then, as soon
as the roads were in good condition, he set off, driving in a
carriage, to visit Pesotsky, his former guardian, who had brought
him up, and was a horticulturist well known all over Russia. The
distance from Kovrinka to Borissovka was reckoned only a little
over fifty miles. To drive along a soft road in May in a comfortable
carriage with springs was a real pleasure.

Pesotsky had an immense house with columns and lions, off which the
stucco was peeling, and with a footman in swallow-tails at the
entrance. The old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and
severe, stretched for almost three-quarters of a mile to the river,
and there ended in a steep, precipitous clay bank, where pines grew
with bare roots that looked like shaggy paws; the water shone below
with an unfriendly gleam, and the peewits flew up with a plaintive
cry, and there one always felt that one must sit down and write a
ballad. But near the house itself, in the courtyard and orchard,
which together with the nurseries covered ninety acres, it was all
life and gaiety even in bad weather. Such marvellous roses, lilies,
camellias; such tulips of all possible shades, from glistening white
to sooty black--such a wealth of flowers, in fact, Kovrin had
never seen anywhere as at Pesotsky's. It was only the beginning of
spring, and the real glory of the flower-beds was still hidden away