with their master.
Victor Alexandr'itch was by no means a stupid man. On the contrary, he
had more than average talents. Few men were more capable of grasping
a new idea and forming a scheme for its realisation, and few men could
play more dexterously with abstract principles. What he wanted was
the power of dealing with concrete facts. The principles which he had
acquired from University lectures and desultory reading were far too
vague and abstract for practical use. He had studied abstract science
without gaining any technical knowledge of details, and consequently
when he stood face to face with real life he was like a student who,
having studied mechanics in text-books, is suddenly placed in a workshop
and ordered to construct a machine. Only there was one difference:
Victor Alexandr'itch was not ordered to do anything. Voluntarily,
without any apparent necessity, he set himself to work with tools which
he could not handle. It was this that chiefly puzzled the peasants. Why
should he trouble himself with these new schemes, when he might live
comfortably as he was? In some of his projects they could detect a
desire to increase the revenue, but in others they could discover
no such motive. In these latter they attributed his conduct to pure
caprice, and put it into the same category as those mad pranks in which
proprietors of jovial humour sometimes indulged.

In the last years of serfage there were a good many landed proprietors
like Victor Alexandr'itch--men who wished to do something beneficent,
and did not know how to do it. When serfage was being abolished the
majority of these men took an active part in the great work and rendered
valuable service to their country. Victor Alexandr'itch acted otherwise.
At first he sympathised warmly with the proposed emancipation and
wrote several articles on the advantages of free labour, but when the
Government took the matter into its own hands he declared that the
officials had deceived and slighted the Noblesse, and he went over to
the opposition. Before the Imperial Edict was signed he went abroad, and
travelled for three years in Germany, France, and Italy. Shortly after
his return he married a pretty, accomplished young lady, the daughter of
an eminent official in St. Petersburg, and since that time he has lived
in his country-house.

Though a man of education and culture, Victor Alexandr'itch spends his
time in almost as indolent a way as the men of the old school. H