"Cut along, cut along! It's not for us to teach them, but
for them to teach




THE SERVANTS IN THE HOUSE

WHEN my father married and brought home his young and
inexperienced bride, Sofya Andreyevna, to
Yasnaya Polyana, Nikolai
Mikhailovitch Rumyantsef was already established as
cook. Before my father's marriage he had a salary of five rubles
a month; but when my mother arrived, she raised him to six, at
which rate he continued the rest of his days; that is, till
somewhere about the end of the eighties. He was succeeded in the
kitchen by his son, Semyon Nikolayevitch, my mother's
godson, and this worthy and beloved man, companion of my childish
games, still lives with us to this day. Under my mother's
supervision he prepared my father's vegetarian diet with
affectionate zeal, and without him my father would very likely
never have lived to the ripe old age he did.

Agafya Mikhailovna was an old woman who lived
at first in the kitchen of "the other house" and afterward on the
home farm. Tall and thin, with big, thoroughbred eyes, and long,
straight hair, like a witch, turning gray, she was rather
terrifying, but more than anything else she was queer.