these facts before you, and knowing your humanity, I beg you not
to refuse immediate help.

"Your well-wisher."

Obviously the letter was written by the doctor with the animal name* or
his lady assistant. Zemstvo doctors and their assistants go on for years
growing more and more convinced every day that they can do _nothing_,
and yet continue to receive their salaries from people who are living
upon frozen potatoes, and consider they have a right to judge whether I
am humane or not.

*Sobol in Russian means "sable-marten."--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

Worried by the anonymous letter and by the fact that peasants came every
morning to the servants' kitchen and went down on their knees there, and
that twenty sacks of rye had been stolen at night out of the barn, the
wall having first been broken in, and by the general depression which
was fostered by conversations, newspapers, and horrible weather--worried
by all this, I worked listlessly and ineffectively. I was writing
"A History of Railways"; I had to read a great number of Russian
and foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the magazines, to make
calculations, to refer to logarithms, to think and to write; then again
to read, calculate, and think; but as soon as I took up a book or began
to think, my thoughts were in a muddle, my eyes began blinking, I would
get up from the table with a sigh and begin walking about the big rooms
of my deserted country-house. When I was tired of walking about I would
stand still at my study window, and, looking across the wide courtyard,
over the pond and the bare young birch-trees and the great fields
covered with recently fallen, thawing snow, I saw on a low hill on the
horizon a group of mud-coloured huts from which a black muddy road ran
down in an irregular streak through the white field. That was Pestrovo,
concerning which my anonymous correspondent had written to me. If it had
not been for the crows who, foreseeing rain or snowy weather, floated
cawing over the pond and the fields, and the tapping in the carpenter's
shed, this bit of the world about which such a fuss was being made
would have seemed like the Dead Sea; it was all so still, motionless,
lifeless, and dreary!

My uneasiness hindered me from working and concentrating myself; I did
not know what it was, and chose to believe it was disappointment. I had
actually given up my post in the Department of Ways and Communications,
and had come here into the country expres