Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/192

180 second daughter, who had remained with him at home, died, and the old man found himself the sole keeper, guardian and master of his riches. His solitary life furnished ample food for his avarice to batten upon, for that vice, as we all know, has the appetite of a wolf and grows more insatiable the more it devours. The human feelings, which had never been very deep in him, grew shallower every hour, and every day something more dropped away from the decrepit wreck. As though expressly to confirm his prejudices against the military, it happened at this time that his son lost money at cards; he sent him a paternal curse that came from the heart, and never troubled himself afterwards to ascertain whether he was alive or dead. Every year more windows were boarded up in the house; at last only two were left, and one of these, as the reader has seen already, was pasted up with paper; every year the important part of the management passed more out of his sight; his petty anxieties were more and more concentrated on the scraps of paper and feathers he picked up in his room. He became more and more uncompromising with the dealers who used to come to purchase his produce; they haggled and haggled and at last threw him up altogether, saying that he was a devil, not a man. The hay and the corn rotted, the stores and stacks decayed into manure only of use for growing cabbages: the flour in the cellars got hard as a stone, and had to be chopped with an axe. It was risky to handle the cloth,