Let us yoke that rascal.
Our hero's beginnings were both modest and obscure.

True, his parents were dvoriane, but he in no way resembled them.

At all events, a short, squab female relative who was present at his birth exclaimed as she lifted up the baby: "He is altogether different from what I had expected him to be.

He ought to have taken after his maternal grandmother, whereas he has been born, as the proverb has it, 'like not father nor mother, but like a chance passer-by.'" Thus from the first life regarded the little Chichikov with sour distaste, and as through a dim, frost-encrusted window.

A tiny room with diminutive casements which were never opened, summer or winter; an invalid father in a dressing-gown lined with lambskin, and with an ailing foot swathed in bandages--a man who was continually drawing deep breaths, and walking up and down the room, and spitting into a sandbox; a period of perpetually sitting on a bench with pen in hand and ink on lips and fingers; a period of being eternally confronted with the copy-book maxim, "Never tell a lie, but obey your superiors, and cherish virtue in your heart;" an everlasting scraping and shuffling of slippers up and down the room; a period of continually hearing a well-known, strident voice exclaim: "So you have been playing the fool again!" at times when the child, weary of the mortal monotony of his task, had added a superfluous embellishment to his copy; a period of experiencing the ever-familiar, but ever-unpleasant, sensation which ensued upon those words as the boy's ear was painfully twisted between two long fingers bent backwards at the tips--such is the miserable picture of that youth of which, in later life, Chichikov preserved but the faintest of memories! But in this world everything is liable to swift and sudden change; and, one day in early spring, when the rivers had melted, the father set forth with his little son in a teliezshka [37] drawn by a sorrel steed of the kind known to horsy folk as a soroka, and having as coachman the diminutive hunchback who, father of the only serf family belonging to the elder Chichikov, served as general factotum in the Chichikov establishment.
For a day and a half the soroka conveyed them on their way; during which time they spent the night at a roadside inn, crossed a river, dined off cold pie and roast mutton, and eventually arrived at the county town.