nuine Russian gentlewoman of the olden times;
she ought to have lived two centuries before, in the old Moscow days.
She was very devout and emotional; she believed in fortune-telling,
charms, dreams, and omens of every possible kind; she believed in the
prophecies of crazy people, in house-spirits, in wood-spirits, in
unlucky meetings, in the evil eye, in popular remedies, she ate
specially prepared salt on Holy Thursday, and believed that the end of
the world was at hand; she believed that if on Easter Sunday the lights
did not go out at vespers, then there would be a good crop of
buckwheat, and that a mushroom will not grow after it has been looked
on by the eye of man; she believed that the devil likes to be where
there is water, and that every Jew has a blood-stained patch on his
breast; she was afraid of mice, of snakes, of frogs, of sparrows, of
leeches, of thunder, of cold water, of draughts, of horses, of goats,
of red-haired people, and black cats, and she regarded crickets and
dogs as unclean beasts; she never ate veal, doves, crayfishes, cheese,
asparagus, artichokes, hares, nor water-melons, because a cut
water-melon suggested the head of John the Baptist, and of oysters she
could not speak without a shudder; she was fond of eating--and fasted
rigidly; she slept ten hours out of the twenty-four--and never went to
bed at all if Vassily Ivanovitch had so much as a headache; she had
never read a single book except _Alexis or the Cottage in the Forest_;
she wrote one, or at the most two letters in a year, but was great in
housewifery, preserving, and jam-making, though with her own hands she
never touched a thing, and was generally disinclined to move from her
place. Arina Vlasyevna was very kindhearted, and in her way not at all
stupid. She knew that the world is divided into masters whose duty it
is to command, and simple folk whose duty it is to serve them--and so
she felt no repugnance to servility and prostrations to the ground; but
she treated those in subjection to her kindly and gently, never let a
single beggar go away empty-handed, and never spoke ill of any one,
though she was fond of gossip. In her youth she had been pretty, had
played the clavichord, and spoken French a little; but in the course of
many years' wanderings with her husband, whom she had married against
her will, she had grown stout, and forgotten music and French. Her son
she loved and feared unutterably; she had given up the management