One hot summer day I was coming home from hunting in a light cart; Yermolaï sat beside me and scratching his nose. The sleeping dogs were up and down like lifeless bodies under our feet. The coachman kept gadflies off the horses with his whip. The white dust rose in a light cloud behind the cart. We drove in between bushes. The road here was full of ruts, and the wheels began in the . Yermolaï started up and looked round.... 'Hullo!' he said; 'there ought to be here. Let's get out.' We stopped and went into the . My dog hit upon a covey. I took a shot and was beginning to reload, when suddenly there was a loud crackling behind me, and a man on horseback came towards me, pushing the bushes apart with his hands. 'Sir... pe-ermit me to ask,' he began in a voice, 'by what right you are--er--shooting here, sir?' The stranger quickly, jerkily and condescendingly. I looked at his face; never in my life have I seen anything like it. Picture to yourselves, gentle readers, a little flaxen-haired man, with a little turn-up red nose and long red moustaches. A Persian cap with a cloth crown covered his forehead right down to his . He was dressed in a shabby yellow Caucasian overcoat, with black velveteen pockets on the breast, and silver braid on all the seams; over his shoulder was a horn; in his sash was sticking a . A raw-boned, hook-nosed horse shambled unsteadily under his weight; two lean, crook-pawed greyhounds kept turning round just under the horse's legs. The face, the glance, the voice, every action, the whole being of the stranger, was of a wild daring and an unbounded, incredible pride; his pale-blue glassy eyes strayed about with a sideway like a drunkard's; he flung back his head, out his cheeks, snorted and quivered all over, as though bursting with dignity--for all the world like a turkey-cock. He repeated his question.  
'I didn't know it was forbidden to shoot here,' I replied.
 
'You are here, sir,' he continued, 'on my land.'
 
'With your permission, I will go off it.'
 
'But pe-ermit me to ask,' he rejoined, 'is it a nobleman I have the honour of addressing?'
 
I mentioned my name.
 
'In that case, oblige me by hunting here. I am a nobleman myself, and am very pleased to do any service to a nobleman.... And my name is Panteley Tchertop-hanov.' He bowed, hallooed, gave his horse a on the neck; the horse shook its head, reared, shied, and on a dog's paws. The dog gave a piercing . Tchertop-hanov boiled over with rage; at the mouth, he struck the horse with his fist on the head between the ears, leaped to the ground quicker than lightning, looked at the dog's paw, on the wound, gave it a kick in the to stop its , caught on to the horse's forelock, and put his foot in the stirrup. The horse flung up its head, and with its tail in the air edged away into the bushes; he followed it, on one leg; he got into the saddle at last, however, flourished his whip in a sort of , blew his horn, and off. I had not time to recover from the unexpected appearance of Tchertop-hanov, when suddenly, almost without any noise, there came out of the bushes a man of forty on a little black . He stopped, took off his green leather cap, and in a thin, voice he asked me whether I hadn't seen a horseman riding a chestnut? I answered that I had.
 
'Which way did the gentleman go?' he went on in the same tone, without putting on his cap.
 
'Over there.'
 
'I thank you, sir.'
 
He made a kissing sound with his lips, swung his legs against his horse's sides, and fell into a jog- in the direction indicated. I looked after him till his peaked cap was hidden behind the branches. This second stranger was not in the least like his in . His face, plump and round as a ball, expressed bashfulness, good-nature, and ; his nose, also plump and round and with blue , a sensualist. On the front of his head there was not a single hair left, some thin brown tufts stuck out behind; there was an ingratiating twinkle in his little eyes, set in long , and a sweet smile on his red, juicy lips. He had on a coat with a stand-up collar and buttons, very worn but clean; his cloth trousers were up high, his fat were visible above the yellow tops of his boots.
 
'Who's that?' I inquired of Yermolaï.
 
'That? Nedopyuskin, Tihon Ivanitch. He lives at Tchertop-hanov's.'
 
'What is he, a poor man?'
 
'He's not rich; but, to be sure, Tchertop-hanov's not got a brass farthing either.'
 
'Then why does he live with him?'
 
'Oh, they made friends. One's never seen without the other.... It's a fact, indeed--where the horse puts its , there the sticks its claw.'
 
We got out of the bushes; suddenly two hounds 'gave tongue' close to us, and a big hare bounded through the oats, which were fairly high by now. The dogs, hounds and harriers, leaped out of the thicket after him, and after the dogs flew out Tchertop-hanov himself. He did not shout, nor urge the dogs on, nor halloo; he was breathless and ; broken, senseless sounds were jerked out of his mouth now and then; he dashed on, his eyes starting out of his head, and furiously at his luckless horse with the whip. The harriers were gaining on the hare... it for a moment, doubled sharply back, and past Yermolaï into the bushes.... The harriers rushed in pursuit. 'Lo-ok out! lo-ok out!' the horseman articulated with effort, in a sort of stutter: 'lo-ok out, friend!' Yermolaï shot... the wounded hare rolled head over heels on the smooth dry grass, leaped into the air, and piteously in the teeth of a worrying dog. The hounds crowded about her. Like an arrow, Tchertop-hanov flew off his horse, clutched his dagger, ran straddling among the dogs with furious imprecations, snatched the hare from them, and, up his whole face, he buried the dagger in its throat up to the very hilt... buried it, and began hallooing. Tihon Ivanitch made his appearance on the edge of the thicket 'Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!' vociferated Tchertop-hanov a second time. 'Ho-ho-ho-ho,' his companion repeated .
 
'But really, you know, one ought not to hunt in summer, 'I observed to Tchertop-hanov, pointing to the trampled-down oats.
 
'It's my field,' answered Tchertop-hanov, gasping.
 
He pulled the hare into shape, hung it on to his saddle, and flung the paws among the dogs.
 
'I owe you a charge, my friend, by the rules of hunting,' he said, addressing Yermolaï. 'And you, dear sir,' he added in the same jerky, voice, 'my thanks.'
 
He mounted his horse.
 
'Pe-ermit me to ask... I've forgotten your name and your father's.'
 
Again I told him my name.
 
'Delighted to make your acquaintance. When you have an opportunity, hope you'll come and see me.... But where is that Fomka, Tihon Ivanitch?' he went on with heat; 'the hare was run down without him.'
 
'His horse fell down under him,' replied Tihon Ivanitch with a smile.
 
'Fell down! Orbassan fell down? Pugh! tut!... Where is he?'
 
'Over there, behind the copse.'
 
Tchertop-hanov struck his horse on the with his whip, and galloped off at a breakneck pace. Tihon Ivanitch bowed to me twice, once for himself and once for his companion, and again set off at a trot into the bushes.
 
These two gentlemen aroused my curiosity keenly. What could unite two creatures so different in the bonds of an inseparable friendship? I began to make . This was what I learned.
 
Panteley Eremyitch Tchertop-hanov had the reputation in the whole surrounding vicinity of a dangerous, crack-brained fellow, haughty and quarrelsome in the extreme. He had served a very short time in the army, and had from the service through 'difficulties' with his superiors, with that rank which is generally regarded as equivalent to no rank at all. He came of an old family, once rich; his lived , after the manner of the steppes--that is, they welcomed all, invited or uninvited, fed them to , gave out oats by the quarter to their guests' coachmen for their teams, kept musicians, singers, jesters, and dogs; on days regaled their people with spirits and beer, drove to Moscow in the winter with their own horses, in heavy old coaches, and sometimes were for whole months without a farthing, living on home-grown produce. The estate came into Panteley Eremyitch's father's hands in a crippled condition; he, in his turn, 'played ducks and drakes' with it, and when he died, left his sole heir, Panteley, the small mortgaged village of Bezsonovo, with thirty-five souls of the male, and seventy-six of the female sex, and twenty-eight acres and a half of useless land on the waste of Kolobrodova, no record of serfs for which could be found among the deceased's deeds. The deceased had, it must be confessed, ruined himself in a very strange way: ' management' had been his destruction. According to his notions, a nobleman ought not to depend on merchants, townsmen, and '' of that sort, as he called them; he set up all possible trades and crafts on his estate; 'it's both seemlier and cheaper,' he used to say: 'it's provident management'! He never this fatal idea to the end of his days; indeed, it was his ruin. But, then, what entertainment it gave him! He never denied himself the satisfaction of a single . Among other freaks, he once began building, after his own fancy, so immense a family coach that, in spite of the united efforts of the peasants' horses, together from the whole village, as well as their owners, it came to grief and fell to pieces on the first hillside. Eremey Lukitch (the name of Panteley's father was Eremey Lukitch), ordered a memorial to be put up on the hillside, but was not, however, at all over the affair. He conceived the happy thought, too, of building a church--by himself, of course--without the assistance of an architect. He burnt a whole forest in making the bricks, laid an immense foundation, as though for a hall, raised the walls, and began putting on the cupola; the cupola fell down. He tried again--the cupola again broke down; he tried the third time---the cupola fell to pieces a third time. Good Eremey Lukitch grew thoughtful; there was something uncanny about it, he reflected... some accursed must have a hand in it... and at once he gave orders to flog all the old women in the village. They flogged the old women; but they didn't get the cupola on, for all that. He began reconstructing the peasants' huts on a new plan, and all on a system of 'provident management'; he set them three homesteads together in a triangle, and in the middle stuck up a post with a painted bird-cage and flag. Every day he invented some new freak; at one time he was making soup of burdocks, at another cutting his horses' tails off to make caps for his servants; at another, proposing to substitute for flax, to feed pigs on mushrooms.... He had once read in the Moscow Gazette an article by a Harkov landowner, Hryak-Hrupyorsky, on the importance of morality to the of the peasant, and the next day he gave a decree to all his peasants to learn off the Harkov landowner's article by heart at once. The peasants learnt the article; the master asked them whether they understood what was said in it? The bailiff replied--that to be sure they understood it! About the same time he ordered all his subjects, with a view to the maintenance of order and provident management, to be numbered, and each to have his number sewn on his collar. On meeting the master, each was to shout, 'Number so-and-so is here!' and the master would answer affably: 'Go on, in God's name!'
 
In spite, however, of order and provident management, Eremey Lukitch got by degrees into a very difficult position; he began at first by mortgaging his villages, and then was brought to the sale of them; the last ancestral home, the village with the unfinished church, was sold at last for to the Crown, luckily not in the lifetime of Eremey Lukitch--he could never have supported such a blow--but a fortnight after his death. He succeeded in dying at home in his own bed, surrounded by his own people, and under the care of his own doctor; but nothing was left to poor Panteley but Bezsonovo.
 
Panteley heard of his father's illness while he was still in the service, in the very heat of the 'difficulties' mentioned above. He was only just nineteen. From his earliest childhood he had not left his father's house, and under the guidance of his mother, a very good-natured but stupid woman, Vassilissa Vassilyevna, he grew up spoilt and . She undertook his education alone; Eremey Lukitch, buried in his economical fancies, had no thoughts to spare for it. It is true, he once punished his son with his own hand for mispronouncing a letter of the alphabet; but Eremey Lukitch had received a cruel and secret blow that day: his best dog had been crushed by a tree. Vassilissa Vassilyevna's efforts in regard Panteley's education did not, however, get beyond one terrific ; in the sweat of her brow she engaged him a tutor, one Birkopf, a retired Alsatian soldier, and to the day of her death she trembled like a leaf before him. 'Oh,' she thought, 'if he throws us up--I'm lost! Where could I turn? Where could I find another teacher? Why, with what pains, what pains I this one away from our neighbours!' And Birkopf, like a shrewd man, took advantage of his unique position; he drank like a fish, and slept from morning till night. On the completion of his 'course of science,' Panteley entered the army. Vassilissa Vassilyevna was no more; she had died six months before that important event, of fright. She had had a dream of a white figure riding on a bear. Eremey Lukitch soon followed his better half.
 
At the first news of his illness, Panteley galloped home at breakneck speed, but he did not find his father alive. What was the of the dutiful son when he found himself, unexpectedly, transformed from a rich heir to a poor man! Few men are capable of bearing so sharp a reverse well. Panteley was , made by it. From an honest, generous, good-natured fellow, though spoilt and hot-tempered, he became haughty and quarrelsome; he gave up associating with the neighbours--he was too proud to visit the rich, and he the poor--and behaved with unheard of to everyone, even to the established authorities. 'I am of the ancient nobility,' he would say. Once he had been on the point of shooting the police-commissioner for coming into the room with his cap on his head. Of course the authorities, on their side, had their revenge, and took every opportunity to make him feel their power; but still, they were rather afraid of him, because he had a desperate temper, and would propose a with knives at the second word. At the slightest retort Tchertop-hanov's eyes blazed, his voice broke.... Ah, er--er--er,' he , 'damn my soul!'... and nothing could stop him. And, moreover, he was a man of character, who had never had a hand in anything the least shady. No one, of course, visited him... and with all this he was a good-hearted, even a great-hearted man in his own way; acts of , of oppression, he would not even against strangers; he stood up for his own peasants like a rock. 'What?' he would say, with a violent blow on his own head: 'touch my people, mine? My name's not Tchertop-hanov, if I...'
 
Tihon Ivanitch Nedopyuskin could not, like Panteley Eremyitch, pride himself on his origin. His father came of the peasant class, and only after forty years of service the rank of a noble. Mr. Nedopyuskin, the father, belonged to the number of those people who are pursued by misfortune with an to personal . For sixty whole years, from his very birth to his very death, the poor man was struggling with all the hardships, , and privations, incidental to people of small means; he struggled like a fish under the ice, never having enough food and sleep--cringing, worrying, wearing himself to exhaustion, over every farthing, with genuine '' suffering in the service, and dying at last in either a garret or a cellar, in the unsuccessful struggle to gain for himself or his children a crust of dry bread. Fate had hunted him down like a hare.
 
He was a good-natured and honest man, though he did take bribes--from a threepenny bit up to a crown piece inclusive. Nedopyuskin had a wife, thin and consumptive; he had children too; luckily they all died young except Tihon and a daughter, Mitrodora, nicknamed 'the merchants' belle,' who, after many painful and ludicrous adventures, was married to a retired attorney. Mr. Nedopyuskin had succeeded before his death in getting Tihon a place as supernumerary clerk in some office; but directly after his father's death Tihon resigned his situation. Their perpetual anxieties, their heartrending struggle with cold and hunger, his mother's depression, his father's despair, the coarse aggressiveness of and shopkeepers--all the unending daily suffering of their life had developed an exaggerated timidity in Tihon: at the sight of his chief he was faint and trembling like a captured bird. He threw up his office. Nature, in her , or perhaps her , in people all sorts of and tendencies utterly inconsistent with their means and their position in society; with her characteristic care and love she had moulded of Tihon, the son of a poor clerk, a , indolent, soft, impressionable creature--a creature fitted exclusively for , gifted with an excessively delicate sense of smell and of taste...she had moulded him, finished him off most carefully, and set her creation to struggle up on sour cabbage and fish! And, ! the creation did struggle up somehow, and began what is called 'life.' Then the fun began. Fate, which had so ruthlessly Nedopyuskin the father, took to the son too; she had a taste for them, one must suppose. But she treated Tihon on a different plan: she did not torture him; she played with him. She did not once drive him to desperation, she did not set him to suffer the degrading agonies of hunger, but she led him a dance through the whole of Russia from one end to the other, from one degrading and ludicrous position to another; at one time Fate made him 'majordomo' to a snappish, Lady Bountiful, at another a humble on a wealthy skinflint merchant, then a private secretary to a goggle-eyed gentleman, with his hair cut in the English style, then she promoted him to the post of something between butler and to a dog-fancier.... In short, Fate drove poor Tihon to drink drop by drop to the dregs the bitter poisoned cup of a dependent existence. He had been, in his time, the sport of the dull and the of slothful masters. How often, alone in his room, released at last 'to go in peace,' after a mob of visitors had their taste for horseplay at his expense, he had , blushing with shame, chill tears of despair in his eyes, that he would run away in secret, would try his luck in the town, would find himself some little place as clerk, or die once for all of hunger in the street! But, in the first place, God had not given him strength of............