Once the lame, crippled village tailor was working in Maria Semenovna’s house.  He had to mend her old father’s coat, and to mend and repair Maria Semenovna’s fur-jacket for her to wear in winter when she went to market.

The lame tailor was a clever man, and a keen observer:  he had seen many different people owing to his profession, and was fond of reflection, condemned as he was to a sedentary life.

Having worked a week at Maria Semenovna’s, he wondered greatly about her life.  One day she came to the kitchen, where he was sitting with his work, to wash a towel, and began to ask him how he was getting on.  He told her of the wrong he had suffered from his brother, and how he now lived on his own allotment of land, separated from that of his brother.

“I thought I should have been better off that way,” he said.  “But I am now just as poor as before.”

“It is much better never to change, but to take life as it comes,” said Maria Semenovna.  “Take life as it comes,” she repeated.

“Why, I wonder at you, Maria Semenovna,” said the lame tailor.  “You alone do the work, and you are so good to everybody.  But they don’t repay you in kind, I see.”

Maria Semenovna did not utter a word in answer.

“I dare say you have found out in books that we are rewarded in heaven for the good we do here.”

“We don’t know that.  But we must try to do the best we can.”

“Is it said so in books?”

“In books as well,” she said, and read to him the Sermon on the Mount.  The tailor was much impressed.  When he had been paid for his job and gone home, he did not cease to think about Maria Semenovna, both what she had said and what she had read to him.

XVII

Peter Nikolaevich Sventizky’s views of the peasantry had now changed for the worse, and the peasants had an equally bad opinion of him.  In the course of a single year they felled twenty-seven oaks in his forest, and burnt a barn which had not been insured.  Peter Nikolaevich came to the conclusion that there was no getting on with the people around him.

At that very time the landowner, Liventsov, was trying to find a manager for his estate, and the Marshal of the Nobility recommended Peter Nikolaevich as the ablest man in the district in the management of land.  The estate owned by Liventsov was an extremely large one, but there was no revenue to be got out of it, as the peasants appropriated all its wealth to their own profit.  Peter Nikolaevich undertook to bring everything into order; rented out his own land to somebody else; and settled with his wife on the Liventsov estate, in a distant province on the river Volga.