d the tanyard were not in the village
itself, but a little way off. They were small factories, and not more
than four hundred workmen were employed in all of them. The tanyard
often made the water in the little river stink; the refuse contaminated
the meadows, the peasants' cattle suffered from Siberian plague, and
orders were given that the factory should be closed. It was considered
to be closed, but went on working in secret with the connivance of the
local police officer and the district doctor, who was paid ten roubles
a month by the owner. In the whole village there were only two decent
houses built of brick with iron roofs; one of them was the local court,
in the other, a two-storied house just opposite the church, there lived
a shopkeeper from Epifan called Grigory Petrovitch Tsybukin.

Grigory kept a grocer's shop, but that was only for appearance' sake:
in reality he sold vodka, cattle, hides, grain, and pigs; he traded in
anything that came to hand, and when, for instance, magpies were wanted
abroad for ladies' hats, he made some thirty kopecks on every pair
of birds; he bought timber for felling, lent money at interest, and
altogether was a sharp old man, full of resources.

He had two sons. The elder, Anisim, was in the police in the detective
department and was rarely at home. The younger, Stepan, had gone in for
trade and helped his father: but no great help was expected from him as
he was weak in health and deaf; his wife Aksinya, a handsome woman with
a good figure, who wore a hat and carried a parasol on holidays, got up
early and went to bed late, and ran about all day long, picking up her
skirts and jingling her keys, going from the granary to the cellar and
from there to the shop, and old Tsybukin looked at her good-humouredly
while his eyes glowed, and at such moments he regretted she had not been
married to his elder son instead of to the younger one, who was deaf,
and who evidently knew very little about female beauty.

The old man had always an inclination for family life, and he loved
his family more than anything on earth, especially his elder son, the
detective, and his daughter-in-law. Aksinya had no sooner married the
deaf son than she began to display an extraordinary gift for business,
and knew who could be allowed to run up a bill and who could not: she
kept the keys and would not trust them even to her husband; she kept the
accounts by means of the reckoning beads, looked at the horses