At length, when your apprenticeship was over, you said to yourself, 'I am going to set up on my own account, and not just to scrape together a kopeck here and a kopeck there, as the Germans do, but to grow rich quick.' Hence you took a shop at a high rent, bespoke a few orders, and set to work to buy up some rotten leather out of which you could make, on each pair of boots, a double profit.

But those boots split within a fortnight, and brought down upon your head dire showers of maledictions; with the result that gradually your shop grew empty of customers, and you fell to roaming the streets and exclaiming, 'The world is a very poor place indeed! A Russian cannot make a living for German competition.' Well, well! 'Elizabeta Vorobei!' But that is a WOMAN'S name! How comes SHE to be on the list?
That villain Sobakevitch must have sneaked her in without my knowing it." "'Grigori Goiezhai-ne-Doiedesh,'" he went on.

"What sort of a man were YOU, I wonder?
Were you a carrier who, having set up a team of three horses and a tilt waggon, left your home, your native hovel, for ever, and departed to cart merchandise to market?
Was it on the highway that you surrendered your soul to God, or did your friends first marry you to some fat, red-faced soldier's daughter; after which your harness and team of rough, but sturdy, horses caught a highwayman's fancy, and you, lying on your pallet, thought things over until, willy-nilly, you felt that you must get up and make for the tavern, thereafter blundering into an icehole?
Ah, our peasant of Russia! Never do you welcome death when it comes!" "And you, my friends ?" continued Chichikov, turning to the sheet whereon were inscribed the names of Plushkin's absconded serfs.

"Although you are still alive, what is the good of you?
You are practically dead.
Whither, I wonder, have your fugitive feet carried you?
Did you fare hardly at Plushkin's, or was it that your natural inclinations led you to prefer roaming the wilds and plundering travellers?
Are you, by this time, in gaol, or have you taken service with other masters for the tillage of their lands?
'Eremei Kariakin, Nikita Volokita and Anton Volokita (son of the foregoing).' To judge from your surnames, you would seem to have been born gadabouts [29].

'Popov, household serf.' Probably you are an educated man, good Popov, and go in for polite thieving, as distinguished from the more vulgar cut-throat sort.