Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/221

Rh no living for a Russian, the Germans always stand in our way!" What peasant is this? Elizaveta Vorobey? Ough, you plague, you are a woman! How did she get in here? That scoundrel Sobakevitch has done me again!'

Tchitchikov was right, it really was a woman. How she got there there was no knowing, but she had been so skilfully introduced, that at a distance she might have been taken for a man, and the name in fact ended in t instead of a, not Elizaveta but Elizavet. However, he paid no attention to that but crossed it out at once. 'Grigory Never-get-there! What sort of a fellow were you? Were you a carrier by trade, did you get a team of three horses and a cart with a cover of sacking, and renounce your home for ever, your native lair, and go trailing off with merchants to the fairs? And did you give up your soul to God on the road, or did your companions do for you on account of some fat red-cheeked soldier's wife, or did some tramp in the forest cast a covetous eye on your leather gloves and your three short-legged but sturdy horses or, perhaps, lying on the rafter bed, you brooded and brooded, and for no rhyme or reason turned into the pot-house, and then straight to a hole in the ice, and vanished for ever! Ah, the Russian people! They don't care to die a natural death! And what about you, my darlings!' he went on, casting his eyes on the page on which Plyushkin's runaway serfs were inscribed: 'though you are alive, what is the good of you? You might as well be dead. And where are your nimble legs