Free Sketches from a Hunter's Album by Ivan Turgenev

happy, prattling noise into the river. Oak trees have spread down the sides of the creek and about the source of the spring itself there is a green area of short, velvety grass. The rays of the sun never penetrate its cold, silvery moistness. I reached the spring and found lying on the grass a birchwood scoop which had been left by a passing peasant for general use. I drank, lay down in the shade and glanced round me. By the inlet formed by the flowing of the spring into the river and therefore always covered with shallow ripples two old men were sitting with their backs to me. One, fairly thickset andtall, in a neat, dark-green caftan and a fluffy peaked cap, was fishing. The other, thin and small, in a wretched little patched frock-coat of mixed material and without a hat, held on his knees a jug of worms and occasionally, as though he were trying to protect himself from the sun, ran his hand over his bald head. I studied him a bit more closely and recognized him as Stepushka from Shumikhino. I beg the reader’s permission to introduce this man.
    A few miles from my village is the large village of Shumikhino, with a stone church erected to Saints Cosmas and Damian. 2 Opposite this church there used to be extensive manorial buildings surrounded by various structures such as outbuildings, workshops, stables, greenhouses and outhouses for carriages, baths and temporary kitchens, accommodation for guests and estate managers, conservatories, swings for the peasantry to enjoy and other more or less useful buildings. In the manorial buildings themselves wealthy landowners used to live, and everything went well for them until suddenly, one fine morning, the whole blessed place was burned to the ground. The gentlefolk took themselves off to another nest; the estate fell into disuse. The extensive burnt-out area became a kitchen garden which was here and there surrounded by piles of bricks left over from the former foundations. Such of the woodwork as survived was used to knock together a small peasant hut covered with ship’s planking which had been bought ten years or so before for the purpose of building a pavilion in the Gothic manner. A gardener, Mitrofan, his wife Aksinya and their seven children were housed in this hut. Mitrofan was ordered to supply greens and vegetables for the manorial table, which was 150 miles away, while Aksinya was given charge of a Tyrolean cow purchased in Moscow for a considerable sum but, unfortunately, deprived of any means of reproduction and therefore barren of milk from the day of purchase. She was also entrusted with a crested, smoke-grey drake, the only surviving ‘manorial’ bird. The children, due to their tender years, were given no tasks to perform, which, however, in no way prevented them from becoming complete layabouts. On a couple of occasions I’d happened to spend the night at this gardener’s hut and in the course of doing so I’d had from him cucumbers which, God knows why, even at the height of summer were outstanding for their size, rubbishy watery taste and thick yellow skins. It was there I’d firstseen Stepushka. Apart from Mitrofan and his family and a deaf old churchwarden Gerasim, who lived out of Christian charity in a tiny room in the house of a one-eyed soldier’s widow, not a single real servant remained in Shumikhino, since Stepushka, with whom I’m intending to acquaint the reader, couldn’t be regarded as a man in a general sense, nor as a manorial servant in particular.
    Every man has at least some position or other in society, or at least some connections. Every manorial servant receives, if not pay, then ‘support’, but Stepushka received absolutely no financial help at all, had no relations and no one knew of his existence. He didn’t even have a past; no one spoke about him; he’d never been included in the census. There were dark rumours abroad that he’d at one time been employed as a valet, but