Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/178

166 from God knows what province into the boredom of this remote district, and at the dealer in his long overcoat, flying by in his racing droshky, and in my thoughts I was carried along with them into their poor lives. If a local official walked by, at once I fell to speculating where he was going, whether it was to spend the evening with some fellow-clerk, or straight home to lounge for half an hour on the steps till the twilight had turned to darkness, and then to sit down to an early supper with his mother, his wife, his wife's sister and all his family, and what their talk would be about, while a serf-girl in necklaces, or a boy in a thick, short jacket, brought in, but only after the soup, a tallow candle in a candlestick that had seen long years of service in the household. As I drove up to some landowner's village, I looked with curiosity at the tall, narrow, wooden belfry, or at the spacious old church of dark wood. Through the green of the trees the red roofs and white chimneys of the owner's house gleamed alluringly in the distance, and I waited with impatience for a gap through the gardens that screened it on both sides, that I might get a full view of its, in those days (alas!), not at all vulgar exterior, and from it I tried to guess what the owner himself was like, whether he was a fat man, and whether he had sons or a full set of six daughters with ringing girlish laughter and games, and the youngest sister, of course, a beauty, and whether they had black eyes, and whether he was a merry