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It is a difficult matter to judge between parents and children. "A vast ravine begins with a tiny rift," Alexyéi Sergyéitch had said to me on another occasion, referring to the same subject. "A wound an arshín long will heal over, but if you cut off so much as a nail, it will not grow again!" I have an idea that the daughters were ashamed of their eccentric old folks.
The day in question was the Friday in Holy Week, and, as night drew on, drippings were becoming congealed into icicles half an arshin long, and in the snow-stripped ice of the river only the dun hue of the wintry clouds was reflected.
"Stop, stop, you fool!" shouted Chichikov to Selifan; and even as he spoke a troika, bound on Government business, came chattering by, and disappeared in a cloud of dust. To Chichikov's curses at Selifan for not having drawn out of the way with more alacrity a rural constable with moustaches of the length of an arshin added his quota.
Yes, the once blue eyes had turned to grey, and the figure added half an arshin to its stature as, standing as erect as a newly made nail, and pressing both feet together, the foreman stretched himself to his full height, and shouted with his mouth open to its widest extent: "Don't shuffle about, nor crowd upon one another, or I'll break your heads!"
As almost every one with claims to respectability, and certainly every one without any, keeps a consul, it follows that there is one consul per superficial meter, arshin, or cubit of Ezekiel within the city. And since every consul is zealous for the honour of his country and not at all above annoying the English on general principles, municipal progress is slow.
The words contained not a particle of genuine contrition. Rather, I believe, he uttered them because he had a weakness not for words which signified anything, but for words which, being out of the way, were not used by the common folk of the suburb. Sometimes Vologonov knocks at the partition-wall with a superannuated arshin measure which has only fifteen vershoki of its length remaining.
"What do you think of this?" said he, unrolling a piece of stuff like a shopman. Natasha, who was sitting opposite to him with her eldest daughter on her lap, turned her sparkling eyes swiftly from her husband to the things he showed her. "That's for Belova? Excellent!" She felt the quality of the material. "It was a ruble an arshin, I suppose?" Pierre told her the price. "Too dear!"
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