s, wiping away a few tears from his cheeks with his pocket
handkerchief as he went and muttering something between his teeth. Papa
came out behind him and turned aside into the drawing-room.

"Do you know what I have just decided to do?" he asked gaily as he laid
a hand upon Mamma's shoulder.

"What, my love?"

"To take Karl Ivanitch with the children. There will be room enough for
him in the carriage. They are used to him, and he seems greatly attached
to them. Seven hundred roubles a year cannot make much difference to us,
and the poor devil is not at all a bad sort of a fellow." I could not
understand why Papa should speak of him so disrespectfully.

"I am delighted," said Mamma, "and as much for the children's sake as
his own. He is a worthy old man."

"I wish you could have seen how moved he was when I told him that he
might look upon the 500 roubles as a present! But the most amusing thing
of all is this bill which he has just handed me. It is worth
seeing," and with a smile Papa gave Mamma a paper inscribed in Karl's
handwriting. "Is it not capital?" he concluded.

The contents of the paper were as follows: [The joke of this bill
consists chiefly in its being written in very bad Russian, with
continual mistakes as to plural and singular, prepositions and so
forth.]

"Two book for the children--70 copeck. Coloured paper, gold frames, and
a pop-guns, blockheads [This word has a double meaning in Russian.] for
cutting out several box for presents--6 roubles, 55 copecks. Several
book and a bows, presents for the childrens--8 roubles, 16 copecks. A
gold watches promised to me by Peter Alexandrovitch out of Moscow, in
the years 18-- for 140 roubles. Consequently Karl Mayer have to receive
139 rouble, 79 copecks, beside his wage."

If people were to judge only by this bill (in which Karl Ivanitch
demanded repayment of all the money he had spent on presents, as well as
the value of a present promised to himself), they would take him to have
been a callous, avaricious egotist yet they would be wrong.

It appears that he had entered the study with the paper in his hand and
a set speech in his head, for the purpose of declaiming eloquently to
Papa on the subject of the wrongs which he believed himself to have
suffered in our house, but that, as soon as ever he began to speak in
the vibratory voice and with the expressive intonations which he used in
dictating to us, his eloquence wrought upon himself more than upo