* This custom has fortunately gone out of fashion even in outlying districts, but an incident of the kind happened to a friend of mine as late as 1871.  He was detained against his will for two whole days by a man whom he had never seen before, and at last effected his escape by bribing the servants of his tyrannical host.

In the time of serfage the domestic serfs had much to bear from their capricious, violent master.  They lived in an atmosphere of abusive language, and were subjected not unfrequently to corporal punishment.  Worse than this, their master was constantly threatening to “shave their forehead”—­that is to say, to give them as recruits—­and occasionally he put his threat into execution, in spite of the wailings and entreaties of the culprit and his relations.  And yet, strange to say, nearly all of them remained with him as free servants after the Emancipation.

In justice to the Russian landed proprietors, I must say that the class represented by Dimitri Ivan’itch has now almost disappeared.  It was the natural result of serfage and social stagnation—­of a state of society in which there were few legal and moral restraints, and few inducements to honourable activity.

Among the other landed proprietors of the district, one of the best known is Nicolai Petrovitch B——­, an old military man with the rank of general.  Like Ivan Ivan’itch, he belongs to the old school; but the two men must be contrasted rather than compared.  The difference in their lives and characters is reflected in their outward appearance.  Ivan Ivan’itch, as we know, is portly in form and heavy in all his movements, and loves to loll in his arm-chair or to loaf about the house in a capacious dressing-gown.  The General, on the contrary, is thin, wiry, and muscular, wears habitually a close-buttoned military tunic, and always has a stern expression, the force of which is considerably augmented by a bristly moustache resembling a shoe-brush.  As he paces up and down the room, knitting his brows and gazing at the floor, he looks as if he were forming combinations of the first magnitude; but those who know him well are aware that this is an optical delusion, of which he is himself to some extent a victim.  He is quite innocent of deep thought and concentrated intellectual effort.  Though he frowns so fiercely he is by no means of a naturally ferocious temperament.  Had he passed all his life in the country he would probably have been as good-natured and phlegmatic as Ivan Ivan’itch himself, but, unlike that worshipper of tranquillity, he had aspired to rise in the service, and had adopted the stern, formal bearing which the Emperor Nicholas considered indispensable in an officer.  The manner which he had at first put on as part of his uniform became by the force of habit almost a part of his nature, and at the age of thirty he was a stern disciplinarian and uncompromising formalist, who confined his attention exclusively to drill and other military duties.  Thus he rose steadily by his own merit, and reached the goal of his early ambition—­the rank of general.