.... You use lofty language, and you are clever, and you are high up
in the service beyond all reach, but haven't real soul, my dear boy...
there's no strength in it."

"A Scythian, in fact," I laughed. "But what about my wife? Tell me
something about my wife; you know her better."

I wanted to talk about my wife, but Sobol came in and prevented me.

"I've had a sleep and a wash," he said, looking at me naively. "I'll
have a cup of tea with some rum in it and go home."

VII

It was by now past seven. Besides Ivan Ivanitch, women servants, the old
dame in spectacles, the little girls and the peasant, all accompanied us
from the hall out on to the steps, wishing us good-bye and all sorts of
blessings, while near the horses in the darkness there were standing and
moving about men with lanterns, telling our coachmen how and which way
to drive, and wishing us a lucky journey. The horses, the men, and the
sledges were white.

"Where do all these people come from?" I asked as my three horses and
the doctor's two moved at a walking pace out of the yard.

"They are all his serfs," said Sobol. "The new order has not reached him
yet. Some of the old servants are living out their lives with him, and
then there are orphans of all sorts who have nowhere to go; there are
some, too, who insist on living there, there's no turning them out. A
queer old man!"

Again the flying horses, the strange voice of drunken Nikanor, the wind
and the persistent snow, which got into one's eyes, one's mouth, and
every fold of one's fur coat....

"Well, I am running a rig," I thought, while my bells chimed in with
the doctor's, the wind whistled, the coachmen shouted; and while this
frantic uproar was going on, I recalled all the details of that strange
wild day, unique in my life, and it seemed to me that I really had gone
out of my mind or become a different man. It was as though the man I had
been till that day were already a stranger to me.

The doctor drove behind and kept talking loudly with his coachman. From
time to time he overtook me, drove side by side, and always, with the
same naive confidence that it was very pleasant to me, offered me a ci
garette or asked for the matches. Or, overtaking me, he would lean right
out of his sledge, and waving about the sleeves of his fur coat, which
were at least twice as long as his arms, shout:

"Go it, Vaska! Beat the thousand roublers! Hey, my kittens!"

And to the accompaniment of loud, m