faces of the young men, the faces of the little fair-haired children,
the handsome, tanned, wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the doors
of the huts, were as familiar to me as though I had known them all from
childhood and my childhood were a matter of the day before yesterday.

The tinkle of the traveller's bells, after growing louder, had faded
away quickly, and the tumult of barking dogs in the village had calmed
down at last. My uncle, lounging in the corner of a small couch, smoked
his long Turkish chibouk in silence.

"This is an extremely nice writing-table you have got for my room," I
remarked.

"It is really your property," he said, keeping his eyes on me, with
an interested and wistful expression, as he had done ever since I had
entered the house. "Forty years ago your mother used to write at this
very table. In our house in Oratow, it stood in the little sitting-room
which, by a tacit arrangement, was given up to the girls--I mean to
your mother and her sister who died so young. It was a present to them
jointly from your uncle Nicholas B. when your mother was seventeen and
your aunt two years younger. She was a very dear, delightful girl, that
aunt of yours, of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name.
She did not shine so much by personal beauty and a cultivated mind in
which your mother was far superior. It was her good sense, the admirable
sweetness of her nature, her exceptional facility and ease in daily
relations, that endeared her to every body. Her death was a terrible
grief and a serious moral loss for us all. Had she lived she would have
brought the greatest blessings to the house it would have been her lot
to enter, as wife, mother, and mistress of a household. She would have
created round herself an atmosphere of peace and content which only