The friend of the family Author:Fyodor Dostoyevsky Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. JWAS approaching the end of my journey, when—passing the little town of B—, which is seven or eight miles from Stepan- ikoff, I was obliged to sto... more »p at the blacksmith's because one of the wheels of my "tarantass" had come to grief—I determined to wait at the smithy while the men there set the mischief right; and as I climbed out of the tarantass I caught sight of a stout man who was in the same predicament as myself—having his vehicle put to rights. He had been standing here an hour, boiling over with impatience, and swearing hard all the while at the men who were working away at his handsome carriage ; he seemed to be a remarkably good grumbler and swearer. He appeared to be a man of about forty-five summers—very fat, middle height, and pock-marked. He looked like a well-to- do landed proprietor, and was dressed in clothes which were designed with a view to comfort rather than elegance. I don't know why he should have been angry with me, since he had never seen me in his life before; however, he certainly was—I could see it at a glance. I judged from the conversation going on among his servants that he had just come from Stepdnchikoff, from my uncle's place; which made me anxious to scrape acquaintance with him. I was about to raise my hat and remark that " these delays upon the road were most disagreeable," but he glared at me from head to foot so savagely that I was a little daunted; he then turned his back on me with a snort, and I felt that though his person from this point of view might be ever so interesting to the physiologically curious, yet he was not in the position best calculated for the receiving and answering the questions I desired to put to him ! So my attempts to make acquaintance failed for the present. However, an unexpected episode as...« less