before, but he has known the calêche for
years, and he knows that the lad's senior
aunt is the Baronessa Bigwigitsin, and if the
Russo-American chose to eat him out of house
and home, the Starosta would bow lower
than ever, so near-neighbourly is he, and
such an unfeigned and disinterested attachment
has he for the juvenile aristocracy.
For, the Russian peasant, who is always
burning a lamp before the shrine of his saint,
astutely thinks that there is no harm in
burning a candle to the other power, too: so
he worships his seigneur, who is the very
devil to him.

I have had two tumblers of tea; and by
this time I have taken stock of the Starosta's
house.  It is the best in the village of Volnoï,
and I should think the Starosta must have
been a thrifty old gentleman, and must be,
by this time, pretty well to do in the world.
I am sorry to hear from Alexis, however,
that our venerable friend declares that he
has not a kopeck in the world, and that he
and his family are " whistling in their fists"
for hunger.   "He is a liar,"  Alexis says,
unaffectedly.  "They are all liars".  The
Starosta's dwelling, though, does not offer
many signs of penury or distress.  Here is
the inventory.

There is but one room on the ground-floor:
a sufficiently vast apartment, of
which the walls are of logs in all their
native roundness, and the ceiling also of logs,
but on which, to be quite genteel, some
imperfect attempts at squaring have been
made. There is not a glimpse of
whitewashing, painting, or paper-hanging to be
seen. The great Russian painter and decorator,
Dirtoff, has taken the chamber in
hand, and has toned down walls, and ceiling,
and flooring to one agreeable dingy grey.
There is not much dust about; no great litter,
where all is litter; not over-many cobwebs
in the corners.  The dirt is concrete.  It
is part of the party walls; and I think
that a thoroughly good scrubbing would
send the Starosta's house tumbling about
his ears. There are two windows to
the room; one is a show-window—a large
aperture, filled with a peculiar dull, grey,
sheenless glass. The panes are so gently and
uniformly darkened with dirt, that the window
serves much more to prevent impertinent
wayfarers from looking in, than to assist the
inmates of the mansion in looking out. The
second window is a much smaller casement,
cut apparently at random high up in the wall,
and close to the ceiling, and of no particular
shape. Its panes are filled with something, but
what that something may be I am unable to
determine: not glass for a certainty, for the
panes bulge inward, and some flap idly to
and fro in the hot summer wind, which, like
a restless dog, is wagging its tail in the sun
outside;—rags, perhaps, paper it may be,
dried fish-skins—a favourite preparation for
glazing windows, very likely.  Whatever it
be, it produces a very unwholesome-looking
semi-transparency; and big black spiders,
tarrakans, and other ogglesome insects, crawl
over its jaundiced field, like hideous ombres
chinoises. One end of the apartment is
partitioned off by a raw-wooden screen, some
six feet in height; but whether that be the
family bed-chamber or the family pigstye I
am quite at a loss to say. The former hypothesis
is scarcely tenable, inasmuch as beneath
the image of the saint there is a sort of
wooden pit, half above ground and half
under it—half a sarcophagus and half a ditch
—which from a mighty bolster—that gigantic
sausage-like sack of black leather must be a
bolster, for I can see the oleaginous marks on
it where heads have lain—and a counterpane
bariolé in so many stripes and counterstripes
of different colours that it looks like the union-jack,
I conjecture to be the Starosta's family
bed.  His summer bed, of course; where his
winter bed is we all know —it is there on the
top of the long stove, where the heap of once
white—now black with dirt and grease—
sheepskins are. If I had any doubt about
this wooden grave being a bed, it would be at
once dispelled; first, by the sight of a leg
covered with a dusty boot which suddenly
surges into the air from beneath the waves
of the parti-coloured counterpane like the
mast of a wrecked vessel; and ultimately by a
head dusty and dishevelled as to its hair, and
bright crimson as to its face, which bobs up to
the surface, glimmers for a moment, and then
disappears—to continue the nautical simile—
like the revolving pharos of the Kish Light-ship.
From a hiccup, too, and a grunt, I am
further enabled to conjecture that there must
be somebody in the bed; and, from some
suppressed whisperings, I am inclined to think
that there are some small matters in the way
of children down somewhere in the vast
depths of this Russian Great Bed of Ware.
On the latter subject I am not enlightened;
but on the former my mind is set at rest by
the statement volunteered by the Starosta,
that his eldest grandson Sophron is lying
down there, "as drunk as oil"—whatever that
state of intoxication may be. He went out
this morning, it appears, to the Seignorial
Kontova, or steward's office, with a little
present to the Alemansky- Bourmister, or
German Intendant of the Barynn, and on
Gospodin Vandegutler's deigning to give Sophron
some green wine, or vodki, Sophron deigned
to drink thereof, till he found himself, or was
found, in the aforesaid oily state of drunkenness.
I should say myself, that Sophron is
more what may be termed '' dumb drunk;"
for, on his grandfather seizing him by the
hair of his head on one of its visits to the
surface, and rating him in most abusive Russ,
Sophron makes superhuman efforts to reply,
but can get no further than an incoherent
and inarticulate gabble; after which, leaving
some of his hair behind like seaweed, he dives
down to the bottom of the counterpane ocean