wind brings their plaintive, ecstatic cry, and a minute later,
however greedily one scans the blue distance, one cannot see a speck
nor catch a sound; and like that, people with their faces and their
words flit through our lives and are drowned in the past, leaving
nothing except faint traces in the memory. Having been in the N----
District from the early spring, and having been almost every day
at the friendly Kuznetsovs', Ivan Alexeyitch had become as much at
home with the old man, his daughter, and the servants as though
they were his own people; he had grown familiar with the whole house
to the smallest detail, with the cosy verandah, the windings of the
avenues, the silhouettes of the trees over the kitchen and the
bath-house; but as soon as he was out of the gate all this would
be changed to memory and would lose its meaning as reality for ever,
and in a year or two all these dear images would grow as dim in his
consciousness as stories he had read or things he had imagined.

"Nothing in life is so precious as people!" Ognev thought in his
emotion, as he strode along the avenue to the gate. "Nothing!"

It was warm and still in the garden. There was a scent of the
mignonette, of the tobacco-plants, and of the heliotrope, which
were not yet over in the flower-beds. The spaces between the bushes
and the tree-trunks were filled with a fine soft mist soaked through
and through with moonlight, and, as Ognev long remembered, coils
of mist that looked like phantoms slowly but perceptibly followed
one another across the avenue. The moon stood high above the garden,
and below it transparent patches of mist were floating eastward.
The whole world seemed to consist of nothing but black silhouettes
and wandering white shadows. Ognev, seeing the mist on a moonlight
August evening almost for the first time in his life, imagined he