TAGANROG,
May 11.


... From K.'s I went to the Holy Mountains.... I came to Slavyansk on a
dark evening. The cabmen refuse to take me to the Holy Mountains at night,
and advise me to spend the night at Slavyansk, which I did very willingly,
for I felt broken and lame with pain.... The town is something like Gogol's
_Mirgorod_; there is a hairdresser and a watchmaker, so that one may
hope that in another thousand years there will be a telephone. The walls
and fences are pasted with the advertisements of a menagerie.... On green
and dusty streets walk pigs, cows, and other domestic creatures. The houses
look cordial and friendly, rather like kindly grandmothers; the pavements
are soft, the streets are wide, there is a smell of lilac and acacia in the
air; from the distance come the singing of a nightingale, the croaking of
frogs, barking, and sounds of a harmonium, of a woman screeching.... I
stopped in Kulikov's hotel, where I took a room for seventy-five kopecks.
After sleeping on wooden sofas and washtubs it was a voluptuous sight to
see a bed with a mattress, a washstand.... Fragrant breezes came in at the
wide-open window and green branches thrust themselves in. It was a glorious
morning. It was a holiday (May 6th) and the bells were ringing in the
cathedral. People were coming out from mass. I saw police officers,
justices of the peace, military superintendents, and other principalities
and powers come out of the church. I bought two kopecks' worth of sunflower
seeds, and hired for six roubles a carriage on springs to take me to the
Holy Mountains and back (in two days' time). I drove out of the town
through little streets literally drowned in the green of cherry, apricot,
and apple trees. The birds sang unceasingly. Little Russians whom I met