It may seem dreadful to live in such conditions, but they did not mind⁠—it was quite possible to live. Akoulína washed and sewed her husband’s and her children’s clothes, spun, wove and bleached her linen, cooked and baked in the common oven, and quarrelled and gossiped with her neighbours. The monthly allowance of meal sufficed not only for the children, but to add to the cow’s food. The firewood was free, and so was food for the cattle, and a little hay from the stables sometimes came their way. They had a strip of kitchen garden. Their cow had calved, and they had their own fowls. Polikéy was employed in the stables to look after two stallions; he bled horses and cattle, cleaned their hoofs, operated on them for lampers, dispensed ointments of his own invention, and for this was paid in money and in kind. Also some of the proprietress’s oats used to remain over, for two measures of which a peasant in the village gave twenty pounds of mutton regularly every month. Life would have been quite tolerable, wad there been no worry. But the family had a great grief. Polikéy in his youth had lived at a stud-farm in another village. The stud-groom into whose hands he happened to fall was the greatest thief in the neighbourhood, and got exiled to Siberia.