ely little attention from the satirists.

When I did not feel disposed to read, and had none of my regular
visitors with me, I sometimes spent an hour or two in talking with the
old man-servant who attended me. Anton was decidedly an old man, but
what his age precisely was I never could discover; either he did not
know himself, or he did not wish to tell me. In appearance he seemed
about sixty, but from certain remarks which he made I concluded that he
must be nearer seventy, though he had scarcely a grey hair on his head.
As to who his father was he seemed, like the famous Topsy, to have no
very clear ideas, but he had an advantage over Topsy with regard to his
maternal ancestry. His mother had been a serf who had fulfilled for some
time the functions of a lady's maid, and after the death of her
mistress had been promoted to a not very clearly defined position of
responsibility in the household. Anton, too, had been promoted in
his time. His first function in the household had been that of
assistant-keeper of the tobacco-pipes, from which humble office he had
gradually risen to a position which may be roughly designated as that of
butler. All this time he had been, of course, a serf, as his mother had
been before him; but being naturally a man of sluggish intellect, he had
never thoroughly realised the fact, and had certainly never conceived
the possibility of being anything different from what he was. His master
was master, and he himself was Anton, obliged to obey his master, or
at least conceal disobedience--these were long the main facts in his
conception of the universe, and, as philosophers generally do with
regard to fundamental facts or axioms, he had accepted them without
examination. By means of these simple postulates he had led a tranquil
life, untroubled by doubts, until the year 1861, when the so-called
freedom was brought to Ivanofka. He himself had not gone to the church
to hear Batushka read the Tsar's manifesto, but his master, on returning
from the ceremony, had called him and said, "Anton, you are free now,
but the Tsar says you are to serve as you have done for two years
longer."

To this startling announcement Anton had replied coolly, "Slushayus,"
or, as we would say, "Yes, sir," and without further comment had gone to
fetch his master's breakfast; but what he saw and heard during the next
few weeks greatly troubled his old conceptions of human society and
the fitness of things. From that time m