IN the village of Reybuzh, just facing the church, stands a two-storeyed
house with a stone foundation and an iron roof. In the lower storey the
owner himself, Filip Ivanov Kashin, nicknamed Dyudya, lives with his
family, and on the upper floor, where it is apt to be very hot in summer
and very cold in winter, they put up government officials, merchants, or
landowners, who chance to be travelling that way. Dyudya rents some bits
of land, keeps a tavern on the highroad, does a trade in tar, honey,
cattle, and jackdaws, and has already something like eight thousand
roubles put by in the bank in the town.

His elder son, Fyodor, is head engineer in the factory, and, as the
peasants say of him, he has risen so high in the world that he is quite
out of reach now. Fyodor's wife, Sofya, a plain, ailing woman, lives at
home at her father-in-law's. She is for ever crying, and every Sunday
she goes over to the hospital for medicine. Dyudya's second son, the
hunchback Alyoshka, is living at home at his father's. He has only
lately been married to Varvara, whom they singled out for him from
a poor family. She is a handsome young woman, smart and buxom. When
officials or merchants put up at the house, they always insist on having
Varvara to bring in the samovar and make their beds.

One June evening when the sun was setting and the air was full of the
smell of hay, of steaming dung-heaps and new milk, a plain-looking cart
drove into Dyudya's yard with three people in it: a man of about thirty
in a canvas suit, beside him a little boy of seven or eight in a long
black coat with big bone buttons, and on the driver's seat a young
fellow in a red shirt.

The young fellow took out the horses and led them out into the street to