In 1812 I was taken to Moscow and placed at a boarding school belonging to Karl Ivanovitch Meyer. There I stayed only some three months, because the school broke up in anticipation of the enemy's coming. I returned to the country.
This epoch of my life was to me so important that I shall dilate upon it, apologizing beforehand if I trespass upon the good nature of the reader.
It was a dull autumn day. On reaching the station whence I must turn off to Gorohina (that was the name of our village) I engaged horses, and drove off by the country road. Though naturally calm, so impatient was I to revisit the scenes where I had passed the best years of my life, that I kept urging the driver to quicken speed with alternate promises of vodka and threats of chastisement. How much easier it was to belabour him than to unloose my purse. I own I struck him twice or thrice, a thing I had never done in my life before. I don't know why, but I had a great liking for drivers as a class.
The driver urged his troika to a quicker pace, but to me it seemed that public-driver-like he coaxed the horses and waved his whip but at the same time tightened the reins. At last I caught sight of Gorohina wood, and in ten minutes more we drove into the courtyard of the manor house.
My heart beat violently. I looked round with unwonted emotion. For eight years I had not seen Gorohina. The little birches which I had seen planted near the palings had now grown into tall branching trees. The courtyard, once adorned with three regular flower beds divided by broad gravel paths, was now an unmown meadow, the grazing land of a red cow.
My britchka stopped at the front door. My servant went to open it, but it was fastened; yet the shutters were open, and the house seemed to be inhabited. A woman emerging from a servant's hut asked what I wanted. Hearing the master had arrived, she ran back into the hut, and soon I had all the inhabitants of the courtyard around me. I was deeply touched to see the known and unknown faces, and I greeted each with a friendly kiss.
The boys my playmates had grown to men. The girls who used to squat upon the floor and run with such alacrity on errands were married women. The men wept. To the women I said unceremoniously:
"How you have aged." And they answered sadly: