"Pardon me, my good Sir, but have you perhaps also served in the army?"
"No," answered Tchichikoff, with a pleasing air of artfulness, "I have served in the civil ranks."
"Oh! a civilian?" repeated Pluschkin, and began to move his lips, as if he was eating something. "But how do you mean it? This offer which you make to me, would be a positive expense to yourself?"
"To be agreeable to you, I am even willing to be a loser."
"Oh, my good Sir! oh, you are my benefactor!" exclaimed Pluschkin, so much overcome with joy, that he did not observe that a large drop of fluid snuff had made its appearance on the point of his nose, and that whilst raising his arms to accompany his exclamations he opened his morning-gown, and thus displayed an under-dress not at all fit for description.
"What a consolation you have brought me! oh, good Heaven! oh, my holy saints!—" and more than this Pluschkin was incapable of articulating.
But a minute had scarcely elapsed, since this joy had shown itself so suddenly upon the mummy-like face of the old man, when it again as suddenly disappeared from his features, and his face again assumed its usual expression of care and anxiety. He recovered even as far again his self-possession as to wipe his nose, and rolling his handkerchief into a ball, he began to pass it across his lips, to and fro.
"With your permission, and without wishing to offend you in the least, will you allow me to ask you, whether you will agree to undertake to pay the tax annually till the next census? and the money for it, would you like to pay it to me, or at once into the imperial treasury?"
"I would suggest that we should come to the following arrangement: we will draw up a contract of sale, in which we will agree that all the hundred-and-twenty serfs are alive, and that you have sold them to me."
"Oh, by a contract of sale," said Pluschkin, musingly, and again munching his lips. "But you see, my dear Sir, a contract of sale is an expense. And the imperial employés are so very impudent indeed! Formerly you could oblige them to do their duty by presenting them with a rouble and a sack of flour, but now-a-day one is obliged to send them nearly a cart-load of grits and a ten rouble note besides, there is such a love for money now prevalent among them. I am quite surprised how it is that nobody else has paid any attention to this real nuisance. Some one ought to have come forward and spoken words of exhortation and salvation to those rogues! Words of exhortation pierce every heart. Whatever people may say, I am of opinion that no sinner can resist words of salvation."