"Yes, yes, yes..." muttered Ivan Ivanitch. "To be sure, to be sure."

"Well, one won't get much done with that slobbering wreck," I thought,
and I felt irritated.

"I am sick of these famine-stricken peasants, bother them! It's nothing
but grievances with them!" Ivan Ivanitch went on, sucking the rind of
the lemon. "The hungry have a grievance against those who have enough,
and those who have enough have a grievance against the hungry. Yes...
hunger stupefies and maddens a man and makes him savage; hunger is not a
potato. When a man is starving he uses bad language, and steals, and may
do worse.... One must realize that."

Ivan Ivanitch choked over his tea, coughed, and shook all over with a
squeaky, smothered laughter.

"'There was a battle at Pol... Poltava,'" he brought out,
gesticulating with both hands in protest against the laughter and
coughing which prevented him from speaking. "'There was a battle at
Poltava!' When three years after the Emancipation we had famine in two
districts here, Fyodor Fyodoritch came and invited me to go to him.
'Come along, come along,' he persisted, and nothing else would satisfy
him. 'Very well, let us go,' I said. And, so we set off. It was in the
evening; there was snow falling. Towards night we were getting near his
place, and suddenly from the wood came 'bang!' and another time 'bang!'
'Oh, damn it all!'... I jumped out of the sledge, and I saw in the
darkness a man running up to me, knee-deep in the snow. I put my arm
round his shoulder, like this, and knocked the gun out of his hand. Then
another one turned up; I fetched him a knock on the back of his head so