hance passer-by.'" Thus from the first life
regarded the little Chichikov with sour distaste, and as through a dim,
frost-encrusted window. A tiny room with diminutive casements which were
never opened, summer or winter; an invalid father in a dressing-gown
lined with lambskin, and with an ailing foot swathed in bandages--a man
who was continually drawing deep breaths, and walking up and down the
room, and spitting into a sandbox; a period of perpetually sitting on
a bench with pen in hand and ink on lips and fingers; a period of being
eternally confronted with the copy-book maxim, "Never tell a lie, but
obey your superiors, and cherish virtue in your heart;" an everlasting
scraping and shuffling of slippers up and down the room; a period of
continually hearing a well-known, strident voice exclaim: "So you have
been playing the fool again!" at times when the child, weary of the
mortal monotony of his task, had added a superfluous embellishment
to his copy; a period of experiencing the ever-familiar, but
ever-unpleasant, sensation which ensued upon those words as the boy's
ear was painfully twisted between two long fingers bent backwards at
the tips--such is the miserable picture of that youth of which, in later
life, Chichikov preserved but the faintest of memories! But in this
world everything is liable to swift and sudden change; and, one day in
early spring, when the rivers had melted, the father set forth with
his little son in a teliezshka [37] drawn by a sorrel steed of the kind
known to horsy folk as a soroka, and having as coachman the diminutive
hunchback who, father of the only serf family belonging to the elder
Chichikov, served as general factotum in the Chichikov establishment.
For a day and a half the soroka conveyed them on their way; during which
time they spent the night at a roadside inn, crossed a river, dined off
cold pie and roast mutton, and eventually arrived at the county town. To
the lad the streets presented a spectacle of unwonted brilliancy, and
he gaped with amazement. Turning into a side alley wherein the mire
necessitated both the most strenuous exertions on the soroka's part and
the most vigorous castigation on the part of the driver and the barin,
the conveyance eventually reached the gates of a courtyard which,
combined with a small fruit garden containing various bushes, a couple
of apple-trees in blossom, and a mean, dirty little shed, constituted
the premises attached to an antiquated-