“Moscow is a big town. It’s all gentlemen’s houses, and there are lots of horses, but there are no sheep, and the dogs are not spiteful. The lads here don’t go out with the star, and they don’t let anyone go into the choir, and once I saw in a shop window fishing-hooks for sale, fitted ready with the line and for all sorts of fish, awfully good ones, there was even one hook that would hold a forty-pound sheatfish. And I have seen shops where there are guns of all sorts, after the pattern of the master’s guns at home, so that I shouldn’t wonder if they are a hundred roubles each.⁠ ⁠… And in the butchers’ shops there are grouse and woodcocks and fish and hares, but the shopmen don’t say where they shoot them.”

“Dear grandfather, when they have the Christmas tree at the big house, get me a gilt walnut, and put it away in the green trunk. Ask the young lady Olga Ignatyevna, say it’s for Vanka.”

Vanka gave a tremulous sigh, and again stared at the window. He remembered how his grandfather always went into the forest to get the Christmas tree for his master’s family, and took his grandson with him. It was a merry time! Grandfather made a noise in his throat, the forest crackled with the frost, and looking at them Vanka chortled too. Before chopping down the Christmas tree, grandfather would smoke a pipe, slowly take a pinch of snuff, and laugh at frozen Vanka.⁠ ⁠… The young fir trees, covered with hoar frost, stood motionless, waiting to see which of them was to die. Wherever one looked, a hare flew like an arrow over the snowdrifts.⁠ ⁠… Grandfather could not refrain from shouting: “Hold him, hold him⁠ ⁠… hold him! Ah, the bobtailed devil!”