However, if Polikéy imagined that he looked like a wealthy peasant proprietor, he deluded himself. It is true that everyone knows that tradesmen worth ten thousand roubles drive in carts with leather harness; only this was not quite the thing. A bearded man in a blue or black coat drives past, sitting alone inside a cart, driving a well-fed horse, and you just glance to see if the horse is sleek and he himself well fed, and at the way he sits, at the horse’s harness, and the tyres of the cartwheels and at his girdle, and you know at once whether the man has a turnover of a hundred or a thousand roubles. Every experienced person looking closer at Polikéy, at his hands, his face, his newly-grown beard, his girdle, at the hay carelessly thrown into the cart, at the bony Drum, at the worn tyres, would know at once that it was only a serf driving past, and not a merchant, or a cattle-dealer, or even a peasant proprietor, and that he was not worth a thousand, or a hundred, or even ten, roubles.