was quite different from all the other houses in the town; it was entirely built of oak and had windows exactly square. The double windows for winter were never taken out all the year round! And there were in it all kinds of little anterooms and passages, lumber-rooms and store-closets, and raised landings with balustrades and alcoves raised on rounded posts, and all sorts of little back premises and cellars. In front was a little palisade, and behind a garden, and in the garden outbuildings of every sort, granaries, cellars, ice-houses . . . a perfect nest of them! And it was not that there were many goods stored in all these outhouses; some, indeed, were tumbling down; but it had all been so arranged in old days, and so it had remained. The Subotchevs had only two horses, ancient, grey, and shaggy; one was covered with white patches from age; they called it the Immovable. They were─at most once a month─harnessed to an extraordinary equipage, known to the whole town, and presenting a resemblance to a terrestrial globe with one quarter cut out in front, lined within with foreign yellow material, closely dotted with big spots like warts. The last yard of that stuff had been woven in Utrecht or Lyons in the time of the Empress Elizabeth! The Subotchevs' coachman, too, was
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