Nowadays landowners have taken to card-playing and junketting and wasting their money, or to joining the Civil Service in St.Petersburg; consequently their estates are going to rack and ruin, and being managed in any sort of fashion, and succeeding in paying their dues with greater difficulty each year.

That being so, not a man of the lot but would gladly surrender to me his dead souls rather than continue paying the poll-tax; and in this fashion I might make--well, not a few kopecks.

Of course there are difficulties, and, to avoid creating a scandal, I should need to employ plenty of finesse; but man was given his brain to USE, not to neglect.

One good point about the scheme is that it will seem so improbable that in case of an accident, no one in the world will believe in it.

True, it is illegal to buy or mortgage peasants without land, but I can easily pretend to be buying them only for transferment elsewhere.