Pavel Afanasiitch had been, ten years before, head butler in my grandmother’s house, and stood particularly high in her favour. But suddenly falling into disgrace, he was as suddenly degraded to being herdsman, and did not long keep even that position. He sank lower still, and struggled on for a while on a monthly pittance of flour in a little hut far away. At last he had died of paralysis, leaving his family in the most utter destitution. ‘Aha!’ commented my grandmother; ‘it’s clear the apple’s not fallen far from the tree. Well, we shall have to make arrangements about this fellow too. I’ve no need of people like that, with scowling faces.’ My grandmother went back to the house--and made arrangements. Three hours later Yermil, completely ‘equipped,’ was brought under the window of her room. The unfortunate boy was being transported to a settlement; the other side of the fence, a few steps from him, was a little cart loaded with his poor belongings. Such were the times then. Yermil stood without his cap, with downcast head, barefoot, with his boots tied up with a string behind his back; his face, turned towards the seignorial mansion, expressed not despair nor grief, nor even bewilderment; a stupid smile was frozen on his colourless lips; his eyes, dry and half-closed, looked stubbornly on the ground. My grandmother was apprised of his presence. She got up from the sofa, went, with a faint rustle of her silken skirts, to the window of the study, and, holding her golden-rimmed double eyeglass on the bridge of her nose, looked at the new exile. In her room there happened to be at the moment four other persons, the butler, Baburin, the page who waited on my grandmother in the daytime, and I. My grandmother nodded her head up and down.... ‘Madam,’ a hoarse almost stifled voice was heard suddenly. I looked round. Baburin’s face was red ... dark red; under his overhanging brows could be seen little sharp points of light.... There was no doubt about it; it was he, it was Baburin, who had uttered the word ‘Madam.’ My grandmother too looked round, and turned her eyeglass from Yermil to Baburin. ‘Who is that ... speaking?’ she articulated slowly ... through her nose. Baburin moved slightly forward. ‘Madam,’ he began, ‘it is I.... I venture ... I imagine ... I make bold to submit to your honour that you are making a mistake in acting as ... as you are pleased to act at this moment.’ ‘That is?’ my grandmother said, in the same voice, not removing her eyeglass. ‘I take the liberty ...’ Baburin went on distinctly, uttering every word though with obvious effort--‘I am referring to the case of this lad who is being sent away to a settlement ... for no fault of his. Such arrangements, I venture to submit, lead to dissatisfaction, and to other--which God forbid!--consequences, and are nothing else than a transgression of the powers allowed to seignorial proprietors.’