se looked
towards the ravine, on the other towards the open country, there were no
fences nor hurdles. Instead there were farm-buildings of all sorts close
to one another, shutting in a small space in front of the house which
was regarded as the yard, and in which hens, ducks, and pigs ran about.

Going out of the house, the student walked along the muddy road towards
the open country. The air was full of a penetrating autumn dampness. The
road was muddy, puddles gleamed here and there, and in the yellow fields
autumn itself seemed looking out from the grass, dismal, decaying, dark.
On the right-hand side of the road was a vegetable-garden cleared of its
crops and gloomy-looking, with here and there sunflowers standing up in
it with hanging heads already black.

Pyotr thought it would not be a bad thing to walk to Moscow on foot; to
walk just as he was, with holes in his boots, without a cap, and
without a farthing of money. When he had gone eighty miles his father,
frightened and aghast, would overtake him, would begin begging him to
turn back or take the money, but he would not even look at him, but
would go on and on.... Bare forests would be followed by desolate
fields, fields by forests again; soon the earth would be white with the
first snow, and the streams would be coated with ice.... Somewhere near
Kursk or near Serpuhovo, exhausted and dying of hunger, he would sink
down and die. His corpse would be found, and there would be a paragraph
in all the papers saying that a student called Shiryaev had died of
hunger....

A white dog with a muddy tail who was wandering about the
vegetable-garden looking for something gazed at him and sauntered after
him.

He walked along the road and thought of death, of the grief of his
family, of the moral sufferings of his father, and then pictured all
sorts of adventures on the road, each more marvellous than the one
before--picturesque places, terrible nights, chance encounters. He
imagined a string of pilgrims, a hut in the forest with one little
window shining in the darkness; he stands before the window, begs for a
night's lodging.... They let him in, and suddenly he sees that they are
robbers. Or, better still, he is taken into a big manor-house, where,
learning who he is, they give him food and drink, play to him on the
piano, listen to his complaints, and the daughter of the house, a
beauty, falls in love with him.

Absorbed in his bitterness and such thoughts, young