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not see the mistress of the house. I was told that she slept badly at night and therefore got up late. The housekeeper’s face, when I was having breakfast, was a kind of a vinegar sour face and so sulky and haughty, it was unpleasant to look at her. Therefore I did not stay long at the table, took my tattered notebook, five pencils, put on my cloak that had dried overnight, and having asked the way, set off for the nearest project for myself that I could think of – one or two huts in a forest, the beginning of a future village.
    I immediately felt better, although nothing in the surroundings made for merriness. Only from here, from this wet footpath, could I take a good look at the castle. At night it had seemed smaller to me, for both of its wings were safely hidden in the thicket of the park and the entire ground floor was completely overtaken by the lilac flower that had grown completely wild. And beneath the lilac grew yellow dahlias, pulpy burdock, dead nettle and other rubbish. Here and there as in all very damp places, greater celandine stuck out its web footed stalks, and sweetbriar and solanum grew wild as well. On the damp soil amidst the various herbs lay branches, covered in white mold, broken off, apparently, by the wind.
    Traces of the human touch were seen only in front of the entrance where late dark purple asters shone in a large flower bed. And the house looked so gloomy and cold that it wrung my heart. It was a two-storeyed building with an enormous belvedere, with turrets along the sides, though not very large ones. Striking was the lack of architecture characteristic of the magnificent constructions of those days when our ancestors ceased building castles but nevertheless demanded that their architects should erect mansions resembling this old lair under all that moss.
    I decided to go to the farmstead only after I had examined everything here, so I continued along the lane. The devil alone knows what kind of a fool had thought of planting fir trees in such a gloomy place, but it had been done, and the park which must have been hundreds of years old was only a little pleasanter than Dante’s famous forest. The firs were so thick that two persons together could not have encircled them with their arms, and they approached the very walls of the castle, their branches knocking at the windows, their blue-green tops rising above the roof. Their trunks were covered by a grey border of moss and lichen, the lower branches hung down to the ground like tents, and the alley was a reminder of a narrow path between hills. Gigantic, gloomy almost bare linden trees could be seen here and there at a close proximity to the very house, dark from the rain. And only one thick oak tree, evidently well looked after, for its top was several metres higher than those of the tallest firs.
    My feet stepped softly along the coniferous path. Smoke came from the left and I went in the direction of the smell. Soon the trees were not so dense anymore and an overgrown wing with boarded-up windows came into view.
    “About half a mile from the castle,” I thought. “If, let’s say, someone took it into his head to kill the owners – nobody would hear anything, even if a gun were fired.”
    At the very windows a small cast-iron pot stood on two bricks, and an old hunchbacked woman was stirring something in it with a spoon. The stoves produced too much smoke and therefore the food was prepared in the open air until the late autumn.
    And again the green but dismal alleyway of trees. I walked until I came to the place where we had entered the park the night before. The marks that our carriage had made were still visible. The forged iron fence, a surprisingly fine piece of work, had fallen down long ago, and broken into pieces it lay there thrown aside. Birch trees had grown through its curves. Behind the fence, where the alleyway turned to the left and dragged on leading to nobody knew where, lay a brown endless plain with twisted