le left a long record of his distinguished victims,
for the repose of whose souls he ordered prayers to be said in
perpetuity. "Book of Remembrance" contains the names of persons who
are to be prayed for at the general requiem services, and so forth.
--Translator.

XVIII

Four hours later, he was driving homeward. His tarantas rolled swiftly
along the soft country road. There had been a drought for a fortnight; a
thin milky cloud was diffused through the air, and veiled the distant
forests; it reeked with the odour of burning. A multitude of small, dark
cloudlets, with indistinctly delineated edges, were creeping across the
pale-blue sky; a fairly strong wind was whisking along in a dry,
uninterrupted stream, without dispelling the sultriness. Leaning his head
against a cushion, and folding his arms on his breast, Lavretzky gazed
at the strips of ploughed land, in fan-shape, which flew past, at the
willow-trees slowly flitting by, at the stupid crows and daws gazing with
dull suspicion askance at the passing equipage, at the long strips of
turf between the cultivated sections, overgrown with artemisia, wormwood,
and wild tansy; he gazed ... and that fresh, fertile nakedness and
wildness of the steppe, that verdure, those long hillocks, the ravines
with stubby oak bushes, the grey hamlets, the flexible birch-trees,--this
whole Russian picture, which he had not seen for a long time, wafted into
his soul sweet and, at the same time, painful sensations, weighed on his
breast with a certain agreeable oppression. His thoughts slowly roved
about; their outlines were as indistinct and confused as the outlines of
those lofty cloudlets, which, also, seemed to be roving. He recalled his
childhood, his mother; he remembered how she died, how they had carried
him to her, and how she, pressing his head to her bosom, had begun to
sing feebly over him, but had cast a glance at Glafira Petrovna--and
had relapsed into silence. He recalled his father, at first alert,
dissatisfied with every one, and with a brazen voice,--then blind,
tearful, and with a dirty grey beard; he recalled how, one day, at table,
after drinking an extra glass of wine, and spilling the sauce over his
napkin, he had suddenly burst out laughing, and had begun, winking his
sightless eyes and flushing crimson, to tell stories of his conquests; he
recalled Varvara Pavlovna,--and involuntarily screwed up