Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/206

196 Make use of them, make use of everything, you are master.'

So said the colonel as he opened the door into his library. It was an immense apartment, the walls of which were lined with books from the floor to the ceiling. There were even stuffed animals in it. There were books on every subject—on forestry, cattle-rearing, pig-breeding, gardening, thousands of all sorts of magazines, handbooks and masses of journals representing the very latest development and perfection in horse-breeding and the natural sciences. There were titles such as Pig-breeding as a Science. Seeing that these were all subjects that did not offer an agreeable way of passing the time, he turned to other bookcases. It was out of the frying-pan into the fire: there all the books were on philosophy. The title of one was Philosophy as a Science. There were six volumes in a row, entitled Preliminary Introduction to the Theory of Thought in its General Aspect as a whole, and in its Application to the Interpretation of the Organic Principles of the Mutual Distribution of Social Productivity. Where-everWherever [sic] Tchitchikov opened the book, on every page he found 'phenomenon,' 'development,' 'abstract,' 'cohesion and combination,' and the devil only knows what. 'No, all that's not in my line,' thought Tchitchikov, and he turned to the third bookcase, where all the books related to art. Here he pulled out a huge volume of somewhat free mythological pictures, and began