Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/200

188 concluded that his visitor must be a perfect fool, was only pretending to have been in the civil service, and had probably been an officer and dangled after actresses. For all that he could not conceal his delight and called down all sorts of blessings, not only upon him but upon his children, without inquiring whether he had any or not. Going to the window he tapped on the pane and shouted: 'Hey, Proshka!' A minute later there was the sound of some one running in hot haste into the hall, moving about there for a long time and tramping with his boots. At last the door opened and Proshka, a boy of thirteen, walked in, wearing boots so huge that they almost flew off his feet at every step. Why Proshka had such big boots the reader may be told at once. Plyushkin kept for the use of all his house-serfs, however many they might be, only one pair of boots, which had always to be kept in the hall. Every one summoned to the master's apartments used as a rule to prance barefoot across the yard, to put on the boots on entering the hall and so to appear at the master's door. When he went out, he left his boots in the hall and set off again on his own soles. If any one had glanced out of window in the autumn, especially when the frosts were beginning, he would have seen all the house-serfs cutting such capers as the most agile dancer scarcely succeeds in executing at the theatre.

'Just look, my good sir, what a loutish face,' Plyushkin said to Tchitchikov, pointing to