No child ever dreams of being grateful for food and shelter, unless taught by the sad experience of destitution. The little guest expects to be welcomed to the feast of life, and even assumes that the board has been spread on purpose for him. Ivan was no exception to the rule: hitherto he had received the devotion and tenderness of those around him as a matter of course; perhaps indeed he was in danger of exacting them as a right, and of becoming, as he grew older, proud and overbearing. But now a change had come. If he knew that he was noble, he had also gained a glimpse of the great truth that “Noblesse oblige.” He had begun to reflect, and to some purpose. “Bativshka,” he said one day to the starost, “why was it you were afraid to let the lord Zoubof or the steward Dmitri know who I was?” “Because they might have killed you, Barrinka, out of spite and jealousy, knowing that your father was our lord before Zoubof came.” “But would they have done anything to _you_, bativshka, for taking care of me?” “Oh! as to _that_ I don’t know. Perhaps I might have had the knout.” Ivan bent down and kissed the old man’s hand. The next morning, when the family rose early to begin the toils of the harvest, Ivan rose with them. “I am going to the field,” he quietly observed, putting on his oldest garments. All protested, especially mativshka, whose love for her foster-child amounted to weakness. “Dmitri and Vasil and little Peter are going, and they are all younger than I am,” said Ivan. “But _they_ are only little mujiks,” she answered. “They must work hard for their bit of rye bread and their bowl of kasha. It was for that God made them.” “Boyars work too;--I am a boyar,” said Ivan, raising his fair head proudly; and he went with the rest. To do him justice, he bore himself bravely in the field, although the unaccustomed toil wearied him quickly, and it was tantalizing to find himself so easily outdone by Michael’s stronger limbs and more practised hands. Yet, after all, it was no great hardship to bind the sheaves along with Anna Popovna all the morning, and at noon to share with her his dinner of okroshka.[9] But harvest-time does not last for ever. At length all the sheaves were gathered in: the wheat to be sold for the profit of the lord of the soil; the rye to be transformed into the black bread, the kvass, the kasha, which were the staple of the mujik’s diet;--for, as they said themselves in one of their terse though homely proverbs, “Wheat picks and chooses, but Mother Rye feeds all fools alike.” Then the long blank winter settled down over Nicolofsky, which, like the rest of Russia, “lay numb beneath the snow” for many a month in the year.