Yet Chichikov made the effort.

As a first step, he took to consulting the other's convenience in all manner of insignificant trifles--to cleaning his pens carefully, and, when they had been prepared exactly to the Chief Clerk's liking, laying them ready at his elbow; to dusting and sweeping from his table all superfluous sand and tobacco ash; to procuring a new mat for his inkstand; to looking for his hat--the meanest-looking hat that ever the world beheld--and having it ready for him at the exact moment when business came to an end; to brushing his back if it happened to become smeared with whitewash from a wall.

Yet all this passed as unnoticed as though it had never been done.

Finally, Chichikov sniffed into his superior's family and domestic life, and learnt that he possessed a grown-up daughter on whose face also there had taken place a nocturnal, diabolical grinding of peas.

HERE was a quarter whence a fresh attack might be delivered! After ascertaining what church the daughter attended on Sundays, our hero took to contriving to meet her in a neat suit and a well-starched dickey: and soon the scheme began to work.