“‘Well, how are you getting on here?’ I asked.

“‘Oh, all right, thank God; I am getting on very well.’

“He was no more a poor timid clerk, but a real landowner, a gentleman.  He was already accustomed to it, had grown used to it, and liked it.  He ate a great deal, went to the bath-house, was growing stout, was already at law with the village commune and both factories, and was very much offended when the peasants did not call him ‘Your Honour.’  And he concerned himself with the salvation of his soul in a substantial, gentlemanly manner, and performed deeds of charity, not simply, but with an air of consequence.  And what deeds of charity!  He treated the peasants for every sort of disease with soda and castor oil, and on his name-day had a thanksgiving service in the middle of the village, and then treated the peasants to a gallon of vodka—­he thought that was the thing to do.  Oh, those horrible gallons of vodka!  One day the fat landowner hauls the peasants up before the district captain for trespass, and next day, in honour of a holiday, treats them to a gallon of vodka, and they drink and shout ‘Hurrah!’ and when they are drunk bow down to his feet.  A change of life for the better, and being well-fed and idle develop in a Russian the most insolent self-conceit.  Nikolay Ivanovitch, who at one time in the government office was afraid to have any views of his own, now could say nothing that was not gospel truth, and uttered such truths in the tone of a prime minister.  ’Education is essential, but for the peasants it is premature.’  ’Corporal punishment is harmful as a rule, but in some cases it is necessary and there is nothing to take its place.’

“‘I know the peasants and understand how to treat them,’ he would say.  ’The peasants like me.  I need only to hold up my little finger and the peasants will do anything I like.’

“And all this, observe, was uttered with a wise, benevolent smile.  He repeated twenty times over ‘We noblemen,’ ‘I as a noble’; obviously he did not remember that our grandfather was a peasant, and our father a soldier.  Even our surname Tchimsha-Himalaisky, in reality so incongruous, seemed to him now melodious, distinguished, and very agreeable.

“But the point just now is not he, but myself.  I want to tell you about the change that took place in me during the brief hours I spent at his country place.  In the evening, when we were drinking tea, the cook put on the table a plateful of gooseberries.  They were not bought, but his own gooseberries, gathered for the first time since the bushes were planted.  Nikolay Ivanovitch laughed and looked for a minute in silence at the gooseberries, with tears in his eyes; he could not speak for excitement.  Then he put one gooseberry in his mouth, looked at me with the triumph of a child who has at last received his favourite toy, and said: 

“‘How delicious!’

“And he ate them greedily, continually repeating, ’Ah, how delicious!  Do taste them!’