Now the public taste has changed.

The reform enthusiast has evaporated, and the existing administrative abuses, more refined and less comical than their predecessors, receive comparatively little attention from the satirists.
When I did not feel disposed to read, and had none of my regular visitors with me, I sometimes spent an hour or two in talking with the old man-servant who attended me.

Anton was decidedly an old man, but what his age precisely was I never could discover; either he did not know himself, or he did not wish to tell me.

In appearance he seemed about sixty, but from certain remarks which he made I concluded that he must be nearer seventy, though he had scarcely a grey hair on his head.
As to who his father was he seemed, like the famous Topsy, to have no very clear ideas, but he had an advantage over Topsy with regard to his maternal ancestry.

His mother had been a serf who had fulfilled for some time the functions of a lady's maid, and after the death of her mistress had been promoted to a not very clearly defined position of responsibility in the household.