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Mísha declared that he would not enter the house, defiled as it was by the presence of a scoundrel; that he would allow no one to throw him out; but that he was on his way to the churchyard to salute the dust of his ancestors. This he did. At the churchyard he was joined by an old house-serf, who had formerly been his man-nurse.
In Semyon's pothouse, which has lately changed its name and become a restaurant a title quite out of keeping with the wretched little hut with its thatch torn off its roof, and its couple of dingy windows two peasant sportsmen are sitting. One of them is called Filimon Slyunka; he is an old man of sixty, formerly a house-serf, belonging to the Counts Zavalin, by trade a carpenter.
I came into possession of my inheritance, or, more correctly speaking, that part of my inheritance which my guardian had thought fit to leave me, gave a freed house-serf Vassily Kudryashev a warranty to superintend all my patrimony, and set off abroad to Berlin. I was abroad, as I have already had the pleasure of telling you, three years. Well.
It was hard to decide at first to what class this Hercules belonged: he did not look like a house-serf, nor a tradesman, nor an impoverished clerk out of work, nor a small ruined landowner, such as takes to being a huntsman or a fighting man; he was, in fact, quite individual.
Well, I never should have thought it!... Don't you know me?" exclaimed a middle-aged man who looked like an old-fashioned house-serf, wearing no beard and dressed in an overcoat with a wide turn-down collar. Stepan Trofimovitch was alarmed at hearing his own name. "Excuse me," he muttered, "I don't quite remember you." "You don't remember me. I am Anisim, Anisim Ivanov.
The lowest house-serf was conscious of being superior to this vagabond and perhaps this was precisely why they treated him with friendliness; the peasants at first amused themselves by chasing him and driving him like a hare over the open country, but afterwards they left him in God's hands, and when once they recognised him as 'queer, they no longer tormented him, and even gave him bread and entered into talk with him.... This was the man I took as my huntsman, and with him I went stand-shooting to a great birch-wood on the banks of the Ista.
Indeed, nothing could have been more appropriate to his insignificant, ever-restless features. He was a dissipated, unmarried house-serf, whose own masters had long ago got rid of him, and who, without any employment, without earning a halfpenny, found means to get drunk every day at other people's expense.
The approach of Yermolai with Vladimir and the man with the strange nickname, Sutchok, broke in on my meditations. Barelegged, ragged and dishevelled, Sutchok looked like a discharged stray house-serf of sixty years old. 'Have you a boat? I asked him. 'I have a boat, he answered in a hoarse, cracked voice; 'but it's a very poor one. 'How so?
He was a freed house-serf; in his tender youth had been taught music, then served as valet, could read and write, had read so much I could discover some few trashy books, and existed now, as many do exist in Russia, without a farthing of ready money; without any regular occupation; fed by manna from heaven, or something hardly less precarious.
"That old man, the one with the bundle, a house-serf of General Zhukov's.... He was cook at our general's, God rest his soul! He came over this evening: 'Let me stay the night, says he.... Well, we had a glass, to be sure.... The wife got the samovar she was going to give the old fellow a cup of tea, and in an unlucky hour she set the samovar in the entrance.
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