1 Also, a sow and her family were helping to grace the scene.
2 In their midst Nozdrev looked like a father lording it over his family circle.
3 Yet this is a nice property, and it is clear that the local peasants are doing well, and that the family, too, is comfortably off.
4 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.
5 Originally a member of a family of plain dvoriane in this province, he entered the Civil Service in St. Petersburg, then married some one's natural daughter in that city, and has returned to lord it with a high hand.
6 Even a certain Semen Ivanovitch, who, for some reason or another, was never alluded to by his family name, but who wore on his index finger a ring with which he was accustomed to dazzle his lady friends, had diminished in bulk.
7 Yet still our landowners keep taking to philanthropy, to converting themselves into philanthropic knights-errant, and spending millions upon senseless hospitals and institutions, and so ruining themselves and turning their families adrift.
8 Upon that Chichikov sold the old house and its little parcel of land for a thousand roubles, and removed, with his one serf and the serf's family, to the capital, where he set about organising a new establishment and entering the Civil Service.
9 The fact was that the worthy Chief of Police filled the office of a sort of father and general benefactor to the town, and that he moved among the citizens as though they constituted part and parcel of his own family, and watched over their shops and markets as though those establishments were merely his own private larder.
10 At the same time, certain questions which he put to those two landowners evinced not only curiosity, but also a certain amount of sound intelligence; for he began by asking how many peasant souls each of them possessed, and how their affairs happened at present to be situated, and then proceeded to enlighten himself also as their standing and their families.