to him from twenty miles around. They came on foot or were brought in
carts, and often he was fetched to patients at a distance. Sometimes from
early in the morning peasant women and children were standing before his
door waiting. He would go out, listen to them and sound them, and would
never let one go away without advice and medicine. His expenditure on drugs
was considerable, as he had to keep a regular store of them. Once some
wayfarers brought Chekhov a man they had picked up by the roadside in the
middle of the night, stabbed in the stomach with a pitchfork. The peasant
was carried into his study and put down in the middle of the floor, and
Chekhov spent a long time looking after him, examining his wounds and
bandaging them up. But what was hardest for Chekhov was visiting the sick
at their own homes: sometimes there was a journey of several hours, and in
this way the time essential for writing was wasted.

The first winter at Melihovo was cold; it lasted late and food was short.
Easter came in the snow. There was a church at Melihovo in which a service
was held only once a year, at Easter. Visitors from Moscow were staying
with Chekhov. The family got up a choir among themselves and sang all the
Easter matins and mass. Pavel Yegorovitch conducted as usual. It was out of
the ordinary and touching, and the peasants were delighted: it warmed their
hearts to their new neighbours.

Then the thaw came. The roads became appalling. There were only three
broken-down horses on the estate and not a wisp of hay. The horses had to
be fed on rye straw chopped up with an axe and sprinkled with flour. One of
the horses was vicious and there was no getting it out of the yard. Another
was stolen in the fields and a dead horse left in its place. And so for a
long time there was only one poor spiritless beast to drive which was
nicknamed Anna Petrovna. This Anna Petrovna contrived to trot to the
station, to take Chekhov to his patients, to haul logs and to eat nothing