apple-trees, and limes strewed their delicate blossoms on your table,
your ink-stand, your books; on the wall hung a blue silk watch-pocket, a
parting present from a kind-hearted, sentimental German governess with
flaxen curls and little blue eyes; and sometimes an old friend from
Moscow would come out to you and throw you into ecstasies with new
poetry, often even with his own. But, oh, the loneliness, the
insufferable slavery of a tutor's lot! the impossibility of escape, the
endless autumns and winters, the ever-advancing disease!... Poor, poor
Avenir!

I paid Sorokoumov a visit not long before his death. He was then hardly
able to walk. The landowner, Gur Krupyanikov, had not turned him out of
the house, but had given up paying him a salary, and had taken another
tutor for Zyozya.... Fofa had been sent to a school of cadets. Avenir
was sitting near the window in an old easy-chair. It was exquisite
weather. The clear autumn sky was a bright blue above the dark-brown
line of bare limes; here and there a few last leaves of lurid gold
rustled and whispered about them. The earth had been covered with frost,
now melting into dewdrops in the sun, whose ruddy rays fell aslant
across the pale grass; there was a faint crisp resonance in the air; the
voices of the labourers in the garden reached us clearly and distinctly.
Avenir wore an old Bokhara dressing-gown; a green neckerchief threw a
deathly hue over his terribly sunken face. He was greatly delighted to
see me, held out his hand, began talking and coughing at once. I made
him be quiet, and sat down by him.... On Avenir's knee lay a manuscript
book of Koltsov's poems, carefully copied out; he patted it with a
smile. 'That's a poet,' he stammered, with an effort repressing his
cough; and he fell to declaiming in a voice scarcely audible:

'Can the eagle's wings