Towards one o’clock dinner is announced, and Ivan Ivan’itch prepares his appetite by swallowing at a gulp a wineglassful of home-made bitters.  Dinner is the great event of the day.  The food is abundant and of good quality, but mushrooms, onions, and fat play a rather too important part in the repast, and the whole is prepared with very little attention to the recognised principles of culinary hygiene.  Many of the dishes, indeed, would make a British valetudinarian stand aghast, but they seem to produce no bad effect on those Russian organisms which have never been weakened by town life, nervous excitement, or intellectual exertion.

No sooner has the last dish been removed than a deathlike stillness falls upon the house:  it is the time of the after-dinner siesta.  The young folks go into the garden, and all the other members of the household give way to the drowsiness naturally engendered by a heavy meal on a hot summer day.  Ivan Ivan’itch retires to his own room, from which the flies have been carefully expelled.  Maria Petrovna dozes in an arm-chair in the sitting-room, with a pocket-handkerchief spread over her face.  The servants snore in the corridors, the garret, or the hay-shed; and even the old watch-dog in the corner of the yard stretches himself out at full length on the shady side of his kennel.

In about two hours the house gradually re-awakens.  Doors begin to creak; the names of various servants are bawled out in all tones, from bass to falsetto; and footsteps are heard in the yard.  Soon a man-servant issues from the kitchen bearing an enormous tea-urn, which puffs like a little steam-engine.  The family assembles for tea.  In Russia, as elsewhere, sleep after a heavy meal produces thirst, so that the tea and other beverages are very acceptable.  Then some little delicacies are served—­such as fruit and wild berries, or cucumbers with honey, or something else of the kind, and the family again disperses.  Ivan Ivan’itch takes a turn in the fields on his begovuiya droshki—­an extremely light vehicle composed of two pairs of wheels joined together by a single board, on which the driver sits stride-legged; and Maria Petrovna probably receives a visit from the Popadya (the priest’s wife), who is the chief gossipmonger of the neighbourhood.  There is not much scandal in the district, but what little there is the Popadya carefully collects, and distributes among her acquaintances with undiscriminating generosity.

In the evening it often happens that a little group of peasants come into the court, and ask to see the “master.”  The master goes to the door, and generally finds that they have some favour to request.  In reply to his question, “Well, children, what do you want?” they tell their story in a confused, rambling way, several of them speaking at a time, and he has to question and cross-question them before he comes to understand clearly what they desire.  If he tells them he cannot grant it,