uring in their make
that he had no choice but to lift up first one foot, and then the other,
for the purpose of scanning their elegant welts.

CHAPTER VIII

It was not long before Chichikov's purchases had become the talk of the
town; and various were the opinions expressed as to whether or not it
was expedient to procure peasants for transferment. Indeed such was the
interest taken by certain citizens in the matter that they advised the
purchaser to provide himself and his convoy with an escort, in order
to ensure their safe arrival at the appointed destination; but though
Chichikov thanked the donors of this advice for the same, and declared
that he should be very glad, in case of need, to avail himself of it, he
declared also that there was no real need for an escort, seeing that the
peasants whom he had purchased were exceptionally peace-loving folk,
and that, being themselves consenting parties to the transferment, they
would undoubtedly prove in every way tractable.

One particularly good result of this advertisement of his scheme was
that he came to rank as neither more nor less than a millionaire.
Consequently, much as the inhabitants had liked our hero in the first
instance (as seen in Chapter I.), they now liked him more than ever.
As a matter of fact, they were citizens of an exceptionally quiet,
good-natured, easy-going disposition; and some of them were even
well-educated. For instance, the President of the Local Council could
recite the whole of Zhukovski's LUDMILLA by heart, and give such an
impressive rendering of the passage "The pine forest was asleep and the
valley at rest" (as well as of the exclamation "Phew!") that one felt,
as he did so, that the pine forest and the valley really WERE as he
described them. The effect was also further heightened by the manner in
which, at such moments, he assumed the most portentous frown. For his
part, the Postmaster went in more for philosophy, and diligently perused
such works as Young's Night Thoughts, and Eckharthausen's A Key to
the Mysteries of Nature; of which latter work he would make copious
extracts, though no one had the slightest notion what they referred
to. For the rest, he was a witty, florid little individual, and much
addicted to a practice of what he called "embellishing" whatsoever he
had to say--a feat which he performed with the aid of such by-the-way
phrases as "my dear sir," "my good So-and-So," "you know," "you
understand," "you may