Publisher's Synopsis
BESIDES old managers, overseers, and foresters there is another type of man which is disappearing more and more from the face of the earth, -the old servant. During my childhood, as I remember, my parents were served by one of those mammoths. After those mammoths there will soon be only bones in old cemeteries, in strata thickly covered with oblivion; from time to time investigators will dig them out. This old servant was called Mikolai Suhovolski; he was a noble from the noble village of Suha Vola, which he mentioned often in his stories. He came to my father from my grandfather of sacred memory, with whom he was an orderly in the time of the Napoleonic wars. He did not himself remember accurately when he began service with my grandfather; when he was asked for the date, he took snuff, and answered, - "Yes, I was then without mustaches, and the colonel, God light his soul, was still very young."
