My respects to the starlings.




TO HIS SISTER.

ROME,
April 1, 1891.


When I got to Rome I went to the post-office and did not find a single
letter. Suvorin has got several letters. I made up my mind to pay you out,
not to write to you at all--but there, God bless you! I am not so very fond
of letters, but when one is travelling nothing is so bad as uncertainty.
How have you settled the summer villa question? Is the mongoose alive? And
so on and so on.

I have been in St. Peter's, in the Capitol, in the Coliseum, in the
Forum--I have even been in a _cafe'-chantant_, but did not derive from
it the gratification I had expected. The weather is a drawback, it is
raining. I am hot in my autumn overcoat, and cold in my summer one.

Travelling is very cheap. One may pay a visit to Italy with only four
hundred roubles and go back with purchases. If I were travelling alone
or with Ivan, I should have brought away the conviction that travelling
in Italy was much cheaper than travelling in the Caucasus. But alas! I
am with the Suvorins.... In Venice we lived in the best of hotels like
Doges; here in Rome we live like Cardinals, for we have taken a salon of
what was once the palace of Cardinal Conti, now the Hotel Minerva; two