"What a forest, brother!" exclaims Yudushka, enraptured.
"This wood has been protected from felling," explains Ilya. "Under your late grandfather Mikhail Vasilyevich, a procession with holy ikons went around it. And look how tall the trees have grown."
"How large do you think the forest is?"
"At that time it held just seventy desyatins, and the desyatin was then, as you know, one and a half times the present size."
"And how many trees, d'you think, are there on one desyatin?"
"I can't tell. Only God has counted them."
"I reckon there are no less than six or seven hundred trees to a desyatin. I mean the desyatin now used. Wait! If we take the number to be six hundred—or, let us say, six hundred and fifty trees, how many trees are there on one hundred and five desyatins?"
Porfiry Vladimirych takes a sheet of paper and multiplies 105 by 65 and gets 6,825 trees.
"Now, see here, if I were to sell all this timber, do you think I can get ten rubles a tree?"
Old Ilya shakes his head.