A few miles from my place there is a large village called Shumihino,
with a stone church, erected in the name of St. Kosmo and St. Damian.
Facing this church there had once stood a large and stately manor-
house, surrounded by various outhouses, offices, workshops, stables and
coach-houses, baths and temporary kitchens, wings for visitors and for
bailiffs, conservatories, swings for the people, and other more or less
useful edifices. A family of rich landowners lived in this manor-house,
and all went well with them, till suddenly one morning all this
prosperity was burnt to ashes. The owners removed to another home; the
place was deserted. The blackened site of the immense house was
transformed into a kitchen-garden, cumbered up in parts by piles of
bricks, the remains of the old foundations. A little hut had been
hurriedly put together out of the beams that had escaped the fire; it
was roofed with timber bought ten years before for the construction of
a pavilion in the Gothic style; and the gardener, Mitrofan, with his
wife Axinya and their seven children, was installed in it. Mitrofan
received orders to send greens and garden-stuff for the master's table,
a hundred and fifty miles away; Axinya was put in charge of a Tyrolese
cow, which had been bought for a high price in Moscow, but had not
given a drop of milk since its acquisition; a crested smoke-coloured
drake too had been left in her hands, the solitary 'seignorial' bird;
for the children, in consideration of their tender age, no special
duties had been provided, a fact, however, which had not hindered them
from growing up utterly lazy. It happened to me on two occasions to
stay the night at this gardener's, and when I passed by I used to get
cucumbers from him, which, for some unknown reason, were even in summer
peculiar for their size, their poor, watery flavour, and their thick
yellow skin. It was there I first saw Styopushka. Except Mitrofan and
his family, and the old deaf churchwarden Gerasim, kept out of charity