"Never tell a falsehood, fear God and pray for the Emperor, respect your superiors and cherish your benefactors," were the sentences and exhortations to which our hero had to listen while still a child and incapable of judging their importance; the continual and uniform noise of his father's feet clad in their felt shoes, and dragging across the floor, accompanied by the well-known but harsh voice of his parent, saying, "You are noisy again, you little rogue!" This is the _triste_ picture of his early childhood, of which he had now scarcely preserved a faint recollection.
But in life all changes unexpectedly; on a fine and sunshiny morning in the spring, when snow had disappeared from the fields and the roads, the father took his son and seated himself with him in a modest telega, drawn by a small horse of the race called 'the hawk' by Russian horse dealers; this open equipage was guided by a little hunchbacked coachman, the only representative of his family and the only serf Tchichikoff's father possessed, as he was also the only servant to do all the work in his master's house. This hawk-race horse dragged them along the high road for more than two days and a half; they slept on the road, crossed the brooks and rivers, fed on cold fish pies and roast mutton, and arrived only late on the third day in the small town of Bobruisk, their destination.
Before the eyes of the little boy, glittered in unexpected magnificence the houses, shops, and streets of the little town, and so much was he at first bewildered by what he saw that he involuntarily opened his mouth widely, and kept it so for some time. His ecstacy was, however, interrupted by the quadruped hawk, falling with the telega into a deep hole, which was the entrance into a narrow lane, which led, as they advanced, down a steep declivity and was buried in mud on either side; for a long time the poor hawk-horse kept exerting itself and kicking about on all fours, assisted by both the hunchbacked coachman and the master himself, until at last the strength of all three combined brought the vehicle out of the hole, and before a small modest-looking house, with two scrubby poplars before and a small insignificant garden behind.