Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/106

96 barrels without a bottom! You think that the master does not know you? Why, he is there, he hears it all.'

'Where is the master?'

'Why, he is sitting at the window, he sees it all.'

And indeed the master was sitting at the window and seeing it all.

To complete the picture, a brat whose mother had just boxed his ears, was screaming at the top of his voice, and a borzoy hound squatting on the ground whined pitifully, for the cook had just looked out of the kitchen and splashed it with scalding water; the hubbub and uproar were insufferable. Their master saw and heard it all, and not till it became so unendurable that it even hindered him in doing nothing did he send to tell them to be a little quieter in their noise.

About two hours before dinner Andrey Ivanovitch went off to his study to set to work seriously, and serious his occupation certainly was. It consisted in thinking over a work which had been continually thought over for a long time past. This work was to deal with all Russia from every point of view—civic, political, religious, philosophical, to solve the difficult questions and problems that beset her, and define clearly her great future; in short, it was a work of wide scope. But so far it had not got beyond the stage of meditation: the pen was bitten, sketches made their appearance on the paper and then it