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Rh transactions; even the patient Greeks who spent ten years in the siege of Troy would have found them tedious. And Pólozof all this time was with the agent, according to the old custom of being hospitable to people who are of use, and he invited him to dinner every day. The agent tried to get out of his way, and persistently refused to stay to dinner. But one day, after he had been having an unusually long session with the directors of the company and was tired and hungry, he consented to go to dinner with Pólozof, who lived in a flat in the factory.

, like the average Charles, John, James, and William, did not care to indulge in intimacies or personal confidences; but on being asked, he related his story briefly, but very plainly. His family, he said, was from Canada; and in Canada almost half the population consisted of the descendants of French colonists; his family was one of these, and therefore his name was of French origin, and his face was more like a Frenchman's than an Englishman's or Yankee's. But, he continued, his grandfather emigrated from the vicinity of Quebec to New York; it often happened so. At the time of this emigration his father was a child. Afterwards, of course, he grew up and became a grown-up man; and at this time a certain rich man, with advanced ideas of agriculture, determined to establish on the southern shores of the Krimea instead of vineyards a cotton plantation; he commissioned some one to find him a manager in North America. James Beaumont was recommended to him—a Canadian by birth, a resident of New York, and a man who had all his life been as many versts from a cotton plantation as you or I, reader, who live at Petersburg or Kursk, have been from Mount Ararat. This is the usual experience of such progressionists. It is true that it was not the fault of the American manager's absolute ignorance of cotton plantations that his plan was ruined, because to plant cotton in the Krimea is as absurd as it would be to establish vineyards in Petersburg. And when this was found out, the American manager was discharged from the cotton plantation, and found a position as distiller in a factory in the government of Tambof. Here he lived all his life; here his son Charles