the experiment.  Taking up the dead body, he takes it away in his tarantass, and a few hours later declares to the inhabitants of a village some miles off that some of them have been guilty of murder, and that he intends to investigate the matter thoroughly.  The peasants of course pay liberally in order to escape the investigation, and the rascally officer, emboldened by success, repeats the trick in different villages until he has gathered a large sum.

Tales and sketches of this kind were very much in fashion during the years which followed the death of the great autocrat, Nicholas I., when the long-pent-up indignation against his severe, repressive regime was suddenly allowed free expression, and they were still much read during the first years of my stay in the country.  Now the public taste has changed.  The reform enthusiast has evaporated, and the existing administrative abuses, more refined and less comical than their predecessors, receive comparatively little attention from the satirists.

When I did not feel disposed to read, and had none of my regular visitors with me, I sometimes spent an hour or two in talking with the old man-servant who attended me.  Anton was decidedly an old man, but what his age precisely was I never could discover; either he did not know himself, or he did not wish to tell me.  In appearance he seemed about sixty, but from certain remarks which he made I concluded that he must be nearer seventy, though he had scarcely a grey hair on his head.  As to who his father was he seemed, like the famous Topsy, to have no very clear ideas, but he had an advantage over Topsy with regard to his maternal ancestry.  His mother had been a serf who had fulfilled for some time the functions of a lady’s maid, and after the death of her mistress had been promoted to a not very clearly defined position of responsibility in the household.  Anton, too, had been promoted in his time.  His first function in the household had been that of assistant-keeper of the tobacco-pipes, from which humble office he had gradually risen to a position which may be roughly designated as that of butler.  All this time he had been, of course, a serf, as his mother had been before him; but being naturally a man of sluggish intellect, he had never thoroughly realised the fact, and had certainly never conceived the possibility of being anything different from what he was.  His master was master, and he himself was Anton, obliged to obey his master, or at least conceal disobedience—­these were long the main facts in his conception of the universe, and, as philosophers generally do with regard to fundamental facts or axioms, he had accepted them without examination.  By means of these simple postulates he had led a tranquil life, untroubled by doubts, until the year 1861, when the so-called freedom was brought to Ivanofka.  He himself had not gone to the church to hear Batushka read the Tsar’s manifesto, but his master, on returning from the ceremony, had called him and said, “Anton, you are free now, but the Tsar says you are to serve as you have done for two years longer.”