* * * * *

N. mortgages his estate with the Bank of the Nobility at 4 per cent,
and then lends the money on mortgage at 12 per cent.

* * * * *

Aristocrats? The same ugly bodies and physical uncleanliness, the same
toothless old age and disgusting death, as with market-women.

* * * * *

N., when a group is being photographed, always stands in the front
row; on addresses he always signs the first; at anniversaries he is
always the first to speak. Always wonders: "O soup! O pastries!"

* * * * *

Z. got tired of having visitors, and he hired a French woman to live
in his house as if she were his mistress. This shocked the ladies and
he no longer had visitors.

* * * * *

Z. is a torch-bearer at funerals. He is an idealist. "In the
undertaker's shop."

* * * * *

N. and Z. are intimate friends, but when they meet in society, they at
once make fun of one another--out of shyness.

* * * * *

Complaint: "My son Stepan was delicate, and I therefore sent him to
school in the Crimea, but there he was caned with a vine-branch, and
that gave him philoxera in the behind and now the doctors can not cure
him."

* * * * *

Mitya and Katya were told that their papa blasted rocks in the quarry.
They wanted to blow up their cross grandpapa, so they took a pound of
powder from their father's room, put it in a bottle, inserted a wick,
and placed it under their grandfather's chair, when he was dozing
after dinner; but soldiers marched by with the band playing--and this
was the only thing that prevented them from carrying out their plan.

* * * * *

Sleep is a marvelous mystery of Nature which renews all the powers of
man, bodily and spiritual. (Bishop Porphyrius Usgensky, "The Book of
My Life.")

* * * * *

A woman imagines that she has a peculiar, exceptional constitution,
whose ailments are different from other people's and which cannot
stand ordinary medicine. She thinks that her son is unlike other
people's sons, that he has to be brought up differently. She believes
in principles, but she thinks that they apply to every one but
herself, because she lives in exceptional circumstances. The son grows
up, a