A Personal Record Author:Joseph Conrad Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London into Ukraine. The MS. of Almayer's Folly — my companion already for some three years... more » or more, and then in the ninth chapter of its age — was deposited unostentatiously on the writing-table placed between two windows. It didn't occur to me to put it away in the drawer the table was fitted with, but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same drawer's brass handles. Two candelabra, with four candles each, lighted up festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering nephew. The blinds were down. Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first peasant hut of the village — part of my maternal grandfather's estate, the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family ; and beyond the village in the limitless blackness of a winter's night there lay the great unfenced fields — not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly bread- giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had come ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing the short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snow- track; a quick tinkle of bells stole gradually into the stillness of the room like a tuneful whisper. My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to help me, and, for the most part, had been standing attentive but unnecessary at the door of the room. I did not want him in the least, but I did not like to tell him to go away. He was a young fellow, certainly more than ten years younger than myself; I had not been—I won't say in that place, but within sixty miles of it, ever since the year '67; yet his guileless physiognomy of the open peasant type seeme...« less