He enjoyed a very respectable property: without troubling himself too much about the management of his estate, he spent about ten thousand rubles[16] a year, procured for himself a capital cook (my friend was fond of good eating); he also imported from Moscow the newest French books and journals. He read nothing in Russian except the reports of his overseer, and that with great difficulty. From morning until dinner (if he did not go off hunting), he did not doff his dressing-gown; he sorted over some sketches or other pertaining to the management, or betook himself to the stable, or to the threshing-shed, and indulged in a good laugh with the peasant wives, who rattled their chains, as the saying is, in his presence, out of ostentation. After dinner my friend dressed himself before the mirror with great care, and drove off to some neighbour endowed with two or three pretty young daughters; heedlessly and pacifically, he dangled after one of them, played at blind-man's buff with them, returned home rather late, and immediately sank into heroic slumber. He could not feel bored, because he never devoted himself to absolute inaction, and he was not fastidious as to his choice of occupations, and, like a child, was amused with the smallest trifle. On the other hand, he felt no special attachment to life, and, it sometimes happened, that when it became necessary to outrun a wolf or a fox, he would launch his horse at full speed over such ravines, that to this day I cannot understand why he did not break his neck a hundred times. He belonged to the category of people who evoke in you the thought that they are not aware of their own value, that beneath their external generosity great and mighty passions are concealed; but he would have laughed in your face, if he could have guessed that you cherished such an opinion concerning him; yes, and, I am bound to admit, I think myself that if my friend was haunted in his youth by any aspiration, indistinct but powerful, toward what is very prettily called "something higher," that aspiration had long, long ago calmed down in him and pined away. He was rather obese, and enjoyed splendid health. In our age, it is impossible not to like people who give little thought to themselves, because they are extremely rare .... and my friend almost completely forgot his own person. However, I have already said too much about him, I think--and my chattering is all the more ill-placed, since he does not serve as the subject of my story. His name was Piótr Feódorovitch Lutchínoff. One autumn day, five of us thorough-going sportsmen had assembled together at Piótr Feódorovitch's. We had spent the entire morning in the fields, had coursed two wolves and a multitude of hares, and had returned home in the ravishingly-agreeable frame of mind which invades every well-regulated man after a successful hunt.