they also were discussing the coming of the new governor-general, enunciating hypotheses with regard to the balls which he would give, and also worrying about their everlasting scallops and gimp.

After the coaches followed several empty drozhkies in single file, till finally no more remained, and our hero could proceed. He heaved a sigh of relief as he parted the leather curtains, and heartily ejaculated, “So that’s the procurator! He has lived, and now he has died; and now they will print in the newspapers that he died regretted by his subordinates and by all mankind, a respected citizen, a wonderful father, a model husband; and soon they will no doubt add that he was accompanied to his grave by the tears of widows and orphans; but, in sooth, when one comes to examine the matter thoroughly, all one will find in confirmation of these statements is that he had wonderfully thick eyebrows!” At this juncture our friend ordered Selifan to drive on as rapidly as possible; and then he said to himself, “It’s as well, on the whole, that we met the funeral procession: they say that it presages good luck to meet a corpse.”

Meanwhile the britchka had turned into some more deserted streets: soon only some long dark wooden fences stretched out on both sides, heralding the city limits. And then the pavement came to an end, and the barriers and the town were left behind. Now, there is nothing more before them, and they are again on the high road. And again, on either side, huge stones mark the versts; there are the supervisors of post-stations to be seen together with wells, peasants’ carts, grey hamlets, brisk women, and bearded men running from the post-houses with bags of oats in their hands. A pedestrian in bast shoes, worn into holes, who has wandered eight hundred versts, is met; then come little towns, nicely built, with tiny wooden shops containing barrels of flour, bast shoes, meat-pies, and other trifles; then there are bridges and fields stretching as far as the eye can reach. The antique equipages of the landed gentry come along; next appears a soldier mounted on a horse, and carrying a green coffer with a leaden plate, which bears the inscription, “Such-and-such a battery of artillery”; strips of land, green, yellow, and black, are visible here and there on the steppe; songs resound afar; crests of pine-trees peer forth amid the mist; the tolling of a bell dies away in the distance; crows fly across the sky as plentiful as flies, and beyond these stretches an illimitable horizon.

As our friend Tchitchikoff drove along he indulged in sundry day-dreams. At the outset he felt nothing, and only gazed behind him, desirous of assuring himself that he had really emerged from the town; but when he saw that the town had long since disappeared from view, that neither a smithy, a mill, nor any of those things which are found in the vicinity of towns was visible, that even the white steeples of the stone churches had, as it were, long since sunk into the earth, he devoted his attention to the road alone, glancing to right and left. The town of N—— became in his memory as though it had never existed—as though he had merely passed through it long, long ago, in the days of his childhood. At length, even the road ceased to occupy him; and he began to close his eyes, and to recline upon his pillow. The author is glad that such was the case, since it affords him an opportunity to speak of his hero; for so far, as the reader has seen, he has been constantly hindered in this design—now by Nozdreff, now by balls, then by the ladies, then by the town gossip—in short, by a thousand of those matters which seem mere trifles when transferred to a book, but which are regarded as extremely important affairs when they actually take place. But we will now lay them completely on one side, and occupy ourselves with our hero’s antecedents.

His origin was obscure and modest. His parents belonged to the nobility, but whether to the ancient aristocracy or to the nobility by right of office, God only knows. He did not resemble them in features: at all events, a female relative who was present at his birth exclaimed, as she took him in her arms, “He has not turned out at all as I expected! He ought to look like his grandmother on his mother’s side, and it would have been better so; but he has been born just as the proverb says, neither like mother nor like father, but like some passing youth.”

Life gazed rather sourly and unpleasantly on him at first, through a dim little window with the snow piled against it: he had neither friend nor comrade in his childhood. A tiny room, with little windows which were opened neither in winter nor in summer; his invalid father in a long surtout lined with lambskin, and knitted slippers, who sighed incessantly as he paced up and down and spat in the sand-box in the corner; interminable sittings on a form with a pen in his hand, and ink on both his fingers and his lips; the