Once he told a fashionable visitor of
ours that we dined daily in the _traktir_, with the Tatar clothes
peddlers and the soldiers of the garrison, with the deliberate intention
of shocking her. I suppose it soothed his feelings for having to serve
our food in our own room. Again, being ordered to "place the _samovar_"
he withdrew to his chamber, the former kitchen of the apartment, and
went to sleep on the cold range, which was his bed, where he was
discovered after we had starved patiently for an hour and a half.

Andrei's supplanter was named Katiusha, but her angular charms
corresponded so precisely with those of the character in "The Mikado"
that we referred to her habitually as Katisha. She had been a serf, a
member of the serf aristocracy, which consisted of the house servants,
and had served always as maid or nurse. She was now struggling on as a
seamstress. Her sewing was wonderfully bad, and she found great
difficulty in bringing up her two children, who demanded fashionable
"European" clothing, and in eking out the starvation wages of her
husband, a superannuated restaurant waiter, also a former serf, and
belonging, like herself, to the class which received personal liberty,
but no land, at the emancipation. Her view of the emancipation was not
entirely favorable. In fact, all the ex-serfs with whom I talked
retained a soft spot in their hearts for the comforts and
irresponsibility of the good old days of serfdom.

Katiusha could neither read nor write, but her naturally acute powers of
observation, unconsciously trained by constant contact with her former
owners, were of very creditable quality. She possessed a genuine talent
for expressing herself neatly. For example, in describing a concert to
which she had been taken, she praised the soprano singer's voice with
much discrimination, winding up with, "It was--how shall I say it?--
round--as round--as round as--a cartwheel!"

Her great delight consisted in being sent by me to purchase eggs and
fruit at the market, or in accompanying me to carry them home, when I
went myself to enjoy the scene and her methods. In her I was able to
study Russian bargaining tactics in their finest flower. She would
haggle for half an hour over a quarter of a cent on very small
purchases, and then would carry whatever she bought into one of the
neighboring shops to be reweighed. To my surprise, the good-natured
venders seemed never to take offense at this significant act; and