Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VI).djvu/99

Rh this side of Moscow. It was laid out on a long, sloping hill-side, and consisted of four clearly marked divisions. In front of the house for two hundred paces stretched the flower-garden, with straight little sandy paths, groups of acacias and lilacs, and round flower-beds; on the left, past the stable-yard, right down to the threshing-floor, lay the fruit-garden closely planted with apple, pear, and plum trees, currants and raspberries; just opposite the house rose intersecting avenues of limes forming a great close quadrangle. The view on the right was bounded by the road, shut in by a double row of silver poplars; behind a clump of weeping birches could be seen the round roof of a green-house. The whole garden was in the tender green of its first spring foliage; there was no sound yet of the loud summer buzz of insects; the young leaves twittered, and chaffinches were singing somewhere, and two doves cooed continually in the same tree, and a solitary cuckoo called, shifting her place at each note; and from the distance beyond the mill-pond came the caw in chorus of the rooks, like the creaking of innumerable cart-wheels. And over all this fresh, secluded, peaceful life the white clouds floated softly, with swelling bosoms like great, lazy birds. Nezhdanov gazed, listened, drank in the air through parted chilling lips.