ducklings swim on the pond, and everything
smells good ... and there are gooseberries.'

"He used to draw out a plan of his estate and always the same things
were shown on it: (_a_) Farmhouse, (_b_) cottage, (_c_) vegetable
garden, (_d_) gooseberry-bush. He used to live meagrely and never had
enough to eat and drink, dressed God knows how, exactly like a beggar,
and always saved and put his money into the bank. He was terribly
stingy. It used to hurt me to see him, and I used to give him money to
go away for a holiday, but he would put that away, too. Once a man gets
a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.

"Years passed; he was transferred to another province. He completed his
fortieth year and was still reading advertisements in the papers and
saving up his money. Then I heard he was married. Still with the same
idea of buying a farmhouse with a gooseberry-bush, he married an
elderly, ugly widow, not out of any feeling for her, but because she had
money. With her he still lived stingily, kept her half-starved, and put
the money into the bank in his own name. She had been the wife of a
postmaster and was used to good living, but with her second husband she
did not even have enough black bread; she pined away in her new life,
and in three years or so gave up her soul to God. And my brother never
for a moment thought himself to blame for her death. Money, like vodka,
can play queer tricks with a man. Once in our town a merchant lay dying.
Before his death he asked for some honey, and he ate all his notes and
scrip with the honey so that nobody should get it. Once I was examining
a herd of cattle at a station and a horse-jobber fell under the engine,
and his foot was cut off. We carried him into the waiting-room, with the
blood pouring down--a terrible business--and all the while he kept on
asking anxiously for his foot; he had twenty-five roubles in his boot
and did not want to lose them."

"Keep to your story," said Bourkin.

"After the death of his wife," Ivan Ivanich continued, after a long
pause, "my brother began to look out for an estate. Of course you may
search for five years, and even then buy a pig in a poke. Through an
agent my brother Nicholai raised a mortgage and bought three hundred
acres with a farmhouse, a cottage, and a park, but there was no orchard,
no gooseberry-bush, no duck-pond; there was a river but the water in it
was coffee-coloured because the estate lay between a brick-yard and a
gelati