Life is short, and Chekhov, from whom you are expecting an answer, would
like it to flash by brilliantly and with dash. He would go to Prince's
Island, to Constantinople, and again to India and Sahalin.... But in the
first place he is not free, he has a respectable family who need his
protection. In the second, he has a large dose of cowardice. Looking
towards the future I call nothing but cowardice. I am afraid of getting
into a muddle, and every journey complicates my financial position. No,
don't tempt me without need. Don't write to me of the sea.

It is hot here. There are warm rains, the evenings are enchanting.
Three-quarters of a mile from here there is a good bathing place and good
sport for picnics, but no time to bathe or go to picnics. Either I am
writing and gnashing my teeth, or settling questions of halfpence with
carpenters and labourers. Misha was cruelly reprimanded by his superiors
for coming to me every week instead of staying at home, and now there is no
one but me to look after the farming, in which I have no faith, as it is on
a petty scale, and more like a gentlemanly hobby than real work. I have
bought three mousetraps, and catch twenty-five mice a day and carry them
away to the copse. It is lovely in the copse....

Our starlings, old and young, suddenly flew away. This puzzled us, for it
won't be time for their migration for ever so long; but suddenly we learn
that the other day clouds of grasshoppers from the south, which were taken
for locusts, flew over Moscow. One wonders how did our starlings find out
that on precisely such a day and so many miles from Melihovo these insects
would fly past? Who told them about it? Truly this is a great mystery....