They plough noiselessly and unseen through a birch thicket, and stop suddenly, holding their breath. A peasant's cart lies sprawling across the road on its side, and the peasant is standing by, looking at the broken axle in perplexity. He has been standing there for some time, cursing the axle and himself and whipping the horse now and then. Finally he sees he cannot loaf there all day long. He looks around and pricks up his ears to make sure no one is coming along the road. Then he selects a suitable birch tree, and takes out an axe. Meanwhile Yudushka stands motionless and watches. The young birch shudders, sways and suddenly sinks to the ground like a sheaf of corn, reaped by the sickle. The thief is about to lop off the length of an axle from the trunk, but Yudushka has decided that the moment has come. He steals upon him and in a trice snatches the axe from his hand.
"Ah!" is all the thief, taken red-handed, has time to exclaim.
"Ah!" Yudushka mimics him. "Are you allowed to steal timber? 'Ah!' Is it your birch-tree you have just felled?"
"Forgive me, sir!"
"I forgave everyone long ago, brother. I am myself a sinner before the Lord and I dare not judge another. It is the law, not I, that condemns you. Take the tree you have felled to the manor-house and pay up a fine of one ruble. In the meantime, I shall keep your axe. Don't you worry, it is in good hands, brother."
Glad that he was able to prove to Ilya how well-grounded were his suspicions in regard to Garanka, Yudushka transports himself in imagination to the forester's cottage and reprimands him soundly. On his way back home he catches three hens belonging to peasants in the act of feeding on his oats.
Back in his study, he falls again to work, and a peculiar system of household management is suddenly born in his brain. The system is based on the assumption that all mankind suddenly has begun to steal his wood and damage his fields by letting cattle graze upon them. But this does not grieve Yudushka, on the contrary he rubs his hands in delight.
"Let your cattle graze on my fields, fell my trees. I shall be the better off for it," he repeats, hugely pleased. Then he takes a fresh sheet of paper and resumes his ciphering and reckoning. The problems to be solved are these: First, how much oats grows on one desyatin and what will the fines amount to if the peasants' hens scratch the oats up? And, second, how many birches grow in Lisy-Yamy and how much money can they bring in if the peasants fell them illegally and pay the fine? "A birch, though felled," reflects Yudushka gleefully, "will in the end get to the house and be used as firewood—firewood free of charge, mind you!"
Long rows of figures appear on the paper. Yudushka becomes so tired and excited that he rises from the table all perspiring and lies down on the sofa to rest. Here his imagination does not cease its work, it merely selects an easier theme.
"Mamma was a clever woman, mamma was," muses Porfiry Vladimirych. "She knew how to be exacting and how to set one at ease—that is why people served her so willingly. Still she was not without sins. Oh, yes, she had plenty of them."