“Yes,” Alexyei Sergyeitch was wont to say, “my day is over; the horse is worn out.  I used to keep poets at my expense, and I used to buy pictures and books from the Jews—­and my geese were quite as good as those of Mukhan, and I had genuine slate-coloured tumbler-pigeons....  I was an amateur of all sorts of things!  Except that I never was a dog-fancier, because of the drunkenness and the clownishness!  I was mettlesome, untamable!  God forbid that a Telyegin should be anything but first-class in everything!  And I had a splendid horse-breeding establishment....  And those horses came ... whence, thinkest thou, my little sir?—­From those very renowned studs of the Tzar Ivan Alexyeitch, the brother of Peter the Great....  I’m telling you the truth!  All stallions, dark brown in colour, with manes to their knees, tails to their hoofs....  Lions!  Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!  But what’s the use of regretting it?  Every man has his limit fixed for him.—­You cannot fly higher than heaven, nor live in the water, nor escape from the earth....  Let us live on a while longer, at any rate!”

And again the old man smiled and took a pinch of his Spanish tobacco.

His peasants loved him.  Their master was kind, according to them, and not a heart-breaker.—­Only, they also repeated that he was a worn-out steed.  Formerly Alexyei Sergyeitch had gone into everything himself:  he had ridden out into the fields, and to the flour-mill, and to the oil-mill and the storehouses, and looked in to the peasants’ cottages; every one was familiar with his racing-drozhky,[38] upholstered in crimson plush and drawn by a well-grown horse with a broad blaze extending clear across its forehead, named “Lantern”—­from that same famous breeding establishment.  Alexyei Sergyeitch drove him himself with the ends of the reins wound round his fists.  But when his seventieth birthday came the old man gave up everything, and entrusted the management of his estate to the peasant bailiff Antip, of whom he secretly stood in awe and called Micromegas (memories of Voltaire!), or simply “robber.”

“Well, robber, hast thou gathered a big lot of stolen goods?” he would say, looking the robber straight in the eye.

“Everything is according to your grace,” Antip would reply merrily.

“Grace is all right, only just look out for thyself, Micromegas!  Don’t dare to touch my peasants, my subjects behind my back!  They will make complaint ... my cane is not far off, seest thou?”

“I always keep your little cane well in mind, dear little father Alexyei Sergyeitch,” replied Antip-Micromegas, stroking his beard.

“That’s right, keep it in mind!” and master and bailiff laughed in each other’s faces.

With his house-serfs, with his serfs in general, with his “subjects” (Alexyei Sergyeitch loved that word), he dealt gently.—­“Because, judge for thyself, little nephew, if thou hast nothing of thine own save the cross on thy neck,[39] and that a brass one, don’t hanker after other folks’ things....  What sense is there in that?” There is no denying the fact that no one even thought of the so-called problem of the serfs at that epoch; and it could not disturb Alexyei Sergyeitch.  He very calmly ruled his “subjects”; but he condemned bad landed proprietors and called them the enemies of their class.