billiard-room, a cool apartment, in which no one had ever seen a single fly, and which our neighbour, disliking heat and sunshine, greatly favoured on this account. He was sitting between the wall and the billiard-table. Souvenir was fidgeting before his bulky person, mocking him, grimacing.… Martin Petrovitch wanted to get rid of him, and thrust both hands out in front of him. Luckily for Souvenir he managed to get away, his brother-in-law’s open hands came into collision with the edge of the billiard-table, and the billiard-board went flying off all its six screws.… What a mass of batter Souvenir would have been turned into under those mighty hands! VI I had long been curious to see how Martin Petrovitch arranged his household, what sort of a home he had. One day I invited myself to accompany him on horseback as far as Eskovo (that was the name of his estate). ‘Upon my word, you want to have a look at my dominion,’ was Martin Petrovitch’s comment. ‘By all means! I’ll show you the garden, and the house, and the threshing-floor, and everything. I have plenty of everything.’ We set off. It was reckoned hardly more than a couple of miles from our place to Eskovo. ‘Here it is--my dominion!’ Martin Petrovitch roared suddenly, trying to turn his immovable neck, and waving his arm to right and left. ‘It’s all mine!’ Harlov’s homestead lay on the top of a sloping hill. At the bottom, a few wretched-looking peasants’ huts clustered close to a small pond. At the pond, on a washing platform, an old peasant woman in a check petticoat was beating some soaked linen with a bat. ‘Axinia!’ boomed Martin Petrovitch, but in such a note that the rooks flew up in a flock from an oat-field near.… ‘Washing your husband’s breeches?’ The peasant woman turned at once and bowed very low. ‘Yes, sir,’ sounded her weak voice. ‘Ay, ay! Yonder, look,’ Martin Petrovitch continued, proceeding at a trot alongside a half-rotting wattle fence, ‘that is my hemp-patch; and that yonder’s the peasants’; see the difference? And this here is my garden; the apple-trees I planted, and the willows I planted too. Else there was no timber of any sort here. Look at that, and learn a lesson!’