Vanka gave a tremulous sigh, and again stared at the window.  He remembered how his grandfather always went into the forest to get the Christmas tree for his master’s family, and took his grandson with him.  It was a merry time!  Grandfather made a noise in his throat, the forest crackled with the frost, and looking at them Vanka chortled too.  Before chopping down the Christmas tree, grandfather would smoke a pipe, slowly take a pinch of snuff, and laugh at frozen Vanka. . . .  The young fir trees, covered with hoar frost, stood motionless, waiting to see which of them was to die.  Wherever one looked, a hare flew like an arrow over the snowdrifts . . . .  Grandfather could not refrain from shouting:  “Hold him, hold him . . . hold him!  Ah, the bob-tailed devil!”

When he had cut down the Christmas tree, grandfather used to drag it to the big house, and there set to work to decorate it. . . .  The young lady, who was Vanka’s favourite, Olga Ignatyevna, was the busiest of all.  When Vanka’s mother Pelageya was alive, and a servant in the big house, Olga Ignatyevna used to give him goodies, and having nothing better to do, taught him to read and write, to count up to a hundred, and even to dance a quadrille.  When Pelageya died, Vanka had been transferred to the servants’ kitchen to be with his grandfather, and from the kitchen to the shoemaker’s in Moscow.

“Do come, dear grandfather,” Vanka went on with his letter.  “For Christ’s sake, I beg you, take me away.  Have pity on an unhappy orphan like me; here everyone knocks me about, and I am fearfully hungry; I can’t tell you what misery it is, I am always crying.  And the other day the master hit me on the head with a last, so that I fell down.  My life is wretched, worse than any dog’s. . . .  I send greetings to Alyona, one-eyed Yegorka, and the coachman, and don’t give my concertina to anyone.  I remain, your grandson, Ivan Zhukov.  Dear grandfather, do come.”

Vanka folded the sheet of writing-paper twice, and put it into an envelope he had bought the day before for a kopeck. . . .  After thinking a little, he dipped the pen and wrote the address: 

To grandfather in the village.

Then he scratched his head, thought a little, and added:  Konstantin Makaritch. Glad that he had not been prevented from writing, he put on his cap and, without putting on his little greatcoat, ran out into the street as he was in his shirt. . . .

The shopmen at the butcher’s, whom he had questioned the day before, told him that letters were put in post-boxes, and from the boxes were carried about all over the earth in mailcarts with drunken drivers and ringing bells.  Vanka ran to the nearest post-box, and thrust the precious letter in the slit. . . .

An hour later, lulled by sweet hopes, he was sound asleep. . . .  He dreamed of the stove.  On the stove was sitting his grandfather, swinging his bare legs, and reading the letter to the cooks. . . .