If good harvests were ever experienced, they must have faded from the popular recollection.

Then there were certain ancient traditions which might have been lessened in bulk and improved in quality by being subjected to searching historical criticism.

More than once, for instance, a leshie, or wood-sprite, had been seen in the neighbourhood; and in several households the domovoi, or brownie, had been known to play strange pranks until he was properly propitiated.

And as a set-off against these manifestations of evil powers, there were well-authenticated stories about a miracle-working image that had mysteriously appeared on the branch of a tree, and about numerous miraculous cures that had been effected by means of pilgrimages to holy shrines.
But it is time to introduce the principal personages of this little community.

Of these, by far the most important was Karl Karl'itch, the steward.
First of all I ought, perhaps, to explain how Karl Schmidt, the son of a well-to-do Bauer in the Prussian village of Schonhausen, became Karl Karl'itch, the principal personage in the Russian village of Ivanofka.
About the time of the Crimean War many of the Russian landed proprietors had become alive to the necessity of improving the primitive, traditional methods of agriculture, and sought for this purpose German stewards for their estates.