Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/119

Rh So spoke his uncle, the actual civil councillor. He had never walked down any street but that which led to the office, and there were no beautiful public buildings in it; he did not notice any of the people he met, whether they were princes or generals, knew nothing of the temptations by which people prone to incontinence are allured in cities, nor did he even go to the theatre. He had said all that he did to stir the ambition and work upon the imagination of the young man. He did not succeed in doing so however. Tyentyetnikov stuck to his decision. He had begun to be bored with official work and Petersburg. The country began to seem to him a haven of freedom, fostering thought and meditation and the one career of useful activity. A fortnight after this conversation he was approaching the places where his childhood had been spent.

How his heart beat, how many memories came back to him when he felt that he was near the village of his fathers! Many places he had completely forgotten and he looked with curiosity at the glorious views as though they were new to him. When the road passed by a narrow ravine into the recesses of an immense tangled forest, when he saw above, below, over his head and beneath his feet, oaks three hundred years old, which it would take three men to span, silver firs, elms, black poplars, and when in answer to the question, 'Whose forest is this?' he was told, 'Tyentyetnikov's'; and when, leaving the forest, the road ran through meadows, by aspen copses, willows