: Arriving to be treated in a southern sanatorium, the narrator misses his native places. Longing recedes when he sees simple Russian birches.

The narrator gets sick. He is given a ticket to the southern sanatorium. For some time he wanders along the embankment “with the joy of a discoverer,” and he is not annoyed by massive idleness or the monotonous noise of the sea. But after a week the storyteller begins to miss something. The sea, in the noise of which “senile sadness” is heard, makes him sad.

For hours, the narrator wanders through the park, examining the lush, vibrant vegetation collected from all sides of the world. All these palm trees, ficuses and cypresses surprise him, but they do not please. And suddenly, in the depths of the park, on a green clearing, he sees three thin birches, on the white trunks and soft greens of which the eye rests so well.

These birches were brought along with a grassy meadow on a steamer, watered and went out, and they took root. But the leaves were facing north, and the peaks too ...

Looking at the birch trees, the narrator recalls his native village, where birch branches are broken on the Trinity, and in the summer birch brooms are harvested for a bath. The brooms are dried in the attic, and “windy, spicy summer” walks there all winter, and the brooms treat people, “evaporate sweat from the skin, horsemanship and diseases from strained bones”.

“Ah, how nice the birches smell,” the narrator thinks.