I once went to see my friend and, as he was not at home, went to his wife’s apartments. She had stepped down into the nursery. As I am quite at home there, I went down into the nursery myself and found her surrounded by her four children. The smallest boy started crying; to pacify him, his mother made him beat the nurse with a handkerchief. She pretended she was crying, while the mother kept on repeating: “Beat her, my darling, beat well the stupid nurse! She had no business annoying baby.” The child was trying to strike the nurse hard; and the harder he struck her, she feigned weeping harder, whereat the child smiled. A little while later, another child fell down. The mother told it to spit on the floor and to kick the place where it had stumbled. When I remarked that it was not good education to allow the child to do that, she answered me: “My friend, you are always philosophising. As if we had not been brought up in the same way! Why should it be different with these babies?” Then I heard the whining of a dog. I looked around and saw a third child pinching a pup, while another child was frightening a canary bird by striking with his hands against the cage: the poor little bird flitted about distressed from one corner to another. I lost my patience, and told their mother: “You are making tyrants of these children, if you do not teach them to respect man and beast. I’ll tell your husband so!” and I slammed the door as I went out. FROM THE “DRONE” RECIPE FOR HIS EXCELLENCY, MR. LACKSENSE This nobleman suffers from a quotidian fever of boasting of his family. He traces his family tree to the beginning of the universe, and hates all those who cannot prove their aristocratic blood at least five hundred years back, and loathes to speak with those whose nobility is only a hundred years old or less. He shakes with fever the moment somebody mentions burghers or peasants in his presence. In opposition to the modern current appellation, he does not even honour them with the name “low-born,” but in the fifty years of his fruitless life he has not yet been able to find a proper term for them. He does not travel to church nor in the streets, for fear of a dead faint which would unavoidably fall upon him the moment he met an ignoble man. Our patient complains hourly against fate for having destined him to share the same air, sun and moon with the common people. He wishes there were no other beings on the whole globe but aristocrats, and that the common people should all be annihilated. He had repeatedly handed in projects to that effect, and they had been highly praised for the good and novel ideas contained therein, though many rejected them, because the inventor demanded three million roubles in advance in order to execute his plans.