“Yes, yes, yes...” muttered Ivan Ivanitch.  “To be sure, to be sure.”

“Well, one won’t get much done with that slobbering wreck,” I thought, and I felt irritated.

“I am sick of these famine-stricken peasants, bother them!  It’s nothing but grievances with them!” Ivan Ivanitch went on, sucking the rind of the lemon.  “The hungry have a grievance against those who have enough, and those who have enough have a grievance against the hungry.  Yes... hunger stupefies and maddens a man and makes him savage; hunger is not a potato.  When a man is starving he uses bad language, and steals, and may do worse....  One must realize that.”

Ivan Ivanitch choked over his tea, coughed, and shook all over with a squeaky, smothered laughter.

“‘There was a battle at Pol...  Poltava,’” he brought out, gesticulating with both hands in protest against the laughter and coughing which prevented him from speaking. “’There was a battle at Poltava!’ When three years after the Emancipation we had famine in two districts here, Fyodor Fyodoritch came and invited me to go to him.  ‘Come along, come along,’ he persisted, and nothing else would satisfy him.  ‘Very well, let us go,’ I said.  And, so we set off.  It was in the evening; there was snow falling.  Towards night we were getting near his place, and suddenly from the wood came ‘bang!’ and another time ‘bang!’ ’Oh, damn it all!’...  I jumped out of the sledge, and I saw in the darkness a man running up to me, knee-deep in the snow.  I put my arm round his shoulder, like this, and knocked the gun out of his hand.  Then another one turned up; I fetched him a knock on the back of his head so that he grunted and flopped with his nose in the snow.  I was a sturdy chap then, my fist was heavy; I disposed of two of them, and when I turned round Fyodor was sitting astride of a third.  We did not let our three fine fellows go; we tied their hands behind their backs so that they might not do us or themselves any harm, and took the fools into the kitchen.  We were angry with them and at the same time ashamed to look at them; they were peasants we knew, and were good fellows; we were sorry for them.  They were quite stupid with terror.  One was crying and begging our pardon, the second looked like a wild beast and kept swearing, the third knelt down and began to pray.  I said to Fedya:  ’Don’t bear them a grudge; let them go, the rascals!’ He fed them, gave them a bushel of flour each, and let them go:  ‘Get along with you,’ he said.  So that’s what he did....  The Kingdom of Heaven be his and everlasting peace!  He understood and did not bear them a grudge; but there were some who did, and how many people they ruined!  Yes...  Why, over the affair at the Klotchkovs’ tavern eleven men were sent to the disciplinary battalion.  Yes....  And now, look, it’s the same thing.  Anisyin, the investigating magistrate, stayed the night with me last Thursday, and he told me about some landowner....  Yes....  They took the