"'Country life has its conveniences,' he would sometimes say. 'You sit
on the verandah and you drink tea, while your ducks swim on the pond,
there is a delicious smell everywhere, and... and the gooseberries are
growing.'

"He used to draw a map of his property, and in every map there were
the same things--(a) house for the family, (b) servants' quarters, (c)
kitchen-garden, (d) gooseberry-bushes. He lived parsimoniously, was
frugal in food and drink, his clothes were beyond description; he looked
like a beggar, but kept on saving and putting money in the bank. He grew
fearfully avaricious. I did not like to look at him, and I used to give
him something and send him presents for Christmas and Easter, but he
used to save that too. Once a man is absorbed by an idea there is no
doing anything with him.

"Years passed: he was transferred to another province. He was over
forty, and he was still reading the advertisements in the papers and
saving up. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same object of
buying a farm and having gooseberries, he married an elderly and ugly
widow without a trace of feeling for her, simply because she had filthy
lucre. He went on living frugally after marrying her, and kept her short
of food, while he put her money in the bank in his name.

"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