With the same powders he fairly ruined his son's health too, in the hope and intention of strengthening it, as he detected anæmia and a tendency to consumption in his constitution inherited from his mother. These same powders were the means of his bringing to the grave his pretty, young, too delicate wife, whom he passionately loved, and by whom he had an only son. He positively passed among them for a sorcerer he had even been given the title of an 'insectivist.' He studied chemistry, mineralogy, entomology, botany, and medicine he doctored patients gratis with herbs and metallic powders of his own invention, after the method of Paracelsus. 'an out-and-out eccentric,' as his neighbours said of him. And of books and odds and ends he had many - for he was a man of some considerable learning. On leaving the country-place where they had always lived up till then, the elder Aratov settled in the old capital, with the object of putting his son to the university, for which he had himself prepared him he bought for a trifle a little house in one of the outlying streets, and established himself in it, with all his books and scientific odds and ends. A few years previously, his father, a provincial gentleman of small property, had moved to Moscow together with him and Platonida Ivanovna, whom he always, however, called Platosha her nephew, too, used the same name.
She took charge of his house, and looked after his household expenditure, a task for which Aratov was utterly unfit. With him lived his father's sister, an elderly maiden lady, over fifty, Platonida Ivanovna. In the spring of 1878 there was living in Moscow, in a small wooden house in Shabolovka, a young man of five-and-twenty, called Yakov Aratov.
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