_The parts in just relation to the whole scheme of existence_, that is the secret of Turgenev's supremacy, and what a piercing instinct for the relative values of men's motives and actions is revealed by his calm, clear scrutiny! Observe in "The Agent" how the old serf Antip's weeping protest against his family's ruin at the hands of the tyrannous agent Sofron is made in _the model village_ Shiplova, with its tidy farm-buildings and new windmill and threshing-floors, its rich stacks and hemp-fields "all in excellent order." It is Sofron, the man of "first rate administrative power," so honey-tongued before the gentry, who farms four hundred acres of his own, and trades in horses and stock and corn and hemp, it is this petty despot in his prosperity who "is harrying the peasants out of their lives." "He is sharp, awfully sharp, and rich, too, the beast!" says the Ryabovo peasant. Behind the tyrannous bailiff Sofron is the owner of Shiplova, the polished Mr. Pyenotchkin, a retired officer of the Guards, who has mixed in the highest society. Mr. Pyenotchkin is a man _comme il faut_, but when he finds that his luckless footman has forgotten to warm the wine, he simply raises his eyebrows and orders his major-domo to "make the necessary arrangements"--to have Fyodor flogged! Here is progress on Western lines comfortably cheek by jowl with serfdom! Of course the sting, here, for the Russian conscience lay precisely in this juxtaposition of old and new, and in the knowledge that the most progressive landowner could exercise his legal right to sell his peasants, send a man away as a conscript, and separate him from his family. But it is well to note that only three or four of the _Sportsman's Sketches_ expose typical cases of a landlord's tyranny and the anachronism of this mediaeval survival--serfdom.