Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/251

Rh punch in the face or a bang on the head when necessary with his own hands.'

'Why should Tchitchikov have to bother and to knock them about himself? He may get a steward.'

'Well, you get him a steward: they are all rogues!'

'They are rogues because the masters don't go into things themselves.'

'That's true,' several persons assented. 'If the master has some notion of management himself and is a judge of character, he always gets a good steward.'

But the superintendent of the factories said that you couldn't get a good steward for less than five thousand roubles. Then the president maintained that you could find one for three thousand. But the superintendent protested: 'Where are you going to find him, he is not just under your nose?'

And the president said: 'No, not under my nose, but in this district; I mean Pyotr Petrovitch Samoylov; he is the steward Tchitchikov's peasants need!'

Many threw themselves warmly into Tchitchikov's position, and the difficulty of transporting so vast a number of peasants alarmed them extremely; they began to be greatly apprehensive of an actual mutiny arising among peasants so unruly as Tchitchikov's. To this the police-master observed that there was no need to be afraid of a mutiny, that the authority of the police-captain