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272 With great energy he began to read the book, which for the last century had been scarcely read, except by those who wanted to set it right. For any one else to read it, except Rakhmétof, would be equivalent to eating sand or sawdust. But it was to his taste.

Such people as Rakhmétof are rare. So far in my life I have met with only eight examples of this species (and that number includes two women). They have no interrelation, except in one feature. Among them were people soft and severe, people melancholy and gay, energetic people and phlegmatic people, sentimental people (one of them had a severe face, sarcastic even to impudence; another one, with a wooden face, quiet and indifferent to everything; they both shed tears before me several times, like hysterical women, and not on their own account, but during talks on different topics. While by themselves, I am sure they wept often), and people who never, under any circumstances, lost their self-possession. There was no resemblance between them in any respect, with the exception of the one feature, but that feature, in itself, joined them into one species, and separated them from the rest of humanity. I used to laugh at those with whom I have been intimately acquainted, when I was alone with them. They would either get angry or not, but they would also join in the laugh. And, really, there was so much that was amusing about them—the main characteristic was amusing—for this very reason, that they were people of a different species, I love to laugh at such people.

The one whom I met in the circle of Lopukhóf and Kirsánof, and about whom I am going to speak here, serves as a living proof that a reserve clause is necessary in the arguments between Lopukhóf and Mertsálof about the peculiarities of the soil in Viéra Pavlovna's second dream. Such a reserve clause is necessary to this effect, that no matter how bad the soil may be, it may have some very tiny portions which will produce healthy grain. The genealogies of the principal characters of my narrative, Viéra Pavlovna, Kirsánof, and Lopukhóf, to tell the truth, do not go back further than their grandfathers and grandmothers, and possibly by some tremendous straining, you may get back still further to some kind of great-grandmother; the great-grandfather is hidden by the darkness of oblivion; all that is known of him is probably that he was the husband of the