-fashioned maps of the times of Catherine. They came upon little
streams too with hollow banks; and tiny lakes with narrow dykes; and
little villages, with low hovels under dark and often tumble-down
roofs, and slanting barns with walls woven of brushwood and gaping
doorways beside neglected threshing-floors; and churches, some
brick-built, with stucco peeling off in patches, others wooden, with
crosses fallen askew, and overgrown grave-yards. Slowly Arkady's heart
sunk. To complete the picture, the peasants they met were all in
tatters and on the sorriest little nags; the willows, with their trunks
stripped of bark, and broken branches, stood like ragged beggars along
the roadside; cows lean and shaggy and looking pinched up by hunger,
were greedily tearing at the grass along the ditches. They looked as
though they had just been snatched out of the murderous clutches of
some threatening monster; and the piteous state of the weak, starved
beasts in the midst of the lovely spring day, called up, like a white
phantom, the endless, comfortless winter with its storms, and frosts,
and snows.... 'No,' thought Arkady, 'this is not a rich country; it
does not impress one by plenty or industry; it can't, it can't go on
like this, reforms are absolutely necessary ... but how is one to carry
them out, how is one to begin?'

Such were Arkady's reflections; ... but even as he reflected, the
spring regained its sway. All around was golden green, all--trees,
bushes, grass--shone and stirred gently in wide waves under the soft
breath of the warm wind; from all sides flooded the endless trilling
music of the larks; the peewits were calling as they hovered over the
low-lying meadows, or noiselessly ran over the tussocks of grass; the
rooks strutted among the half-grown short spring-corn, standing out
black against its tender green; they disappeared in the already
whitening rye, only from time to time their heads peeped out amid its
grey waves. Arkady gazed and gazed, and his reflections grew slowly
fainter and passed away.... He flung off his cloak and turned to his
father, with a face so bright and boyish, that the latter gave him
another hug.

'We're not far off now,' remarked Nikolai Petrovitch; 'we have only to
get up this hill, and the house will be in sight. We shall get on
together splendidly, Arkasha; you shall help me in farming the estate,
if only it isn't a bore to you. We must draw close to one another now,
and learn to kno