They began to refer more and more frequently to the cooks whom they had left behind them in Petersburg, and they even wept, on the sly.
"What is going on now in Pettifoggers Street, your Excellency ?" one General asked the other.
"Don't allude to it, your Excellency! My whole heart is sore!" replied the other General.
"It is pleasant here, very pleasant--there are no words to describe it; but still, it is awkward for us to be all alone, isn't it?
And I regret my uniform also." "Of course you do! Especially as it is of the fourth class,[40] so that it makes you dizzy to gaze at the embroidery alone!" Then they began to urge the peasant: Take them, take them to Pettifoggers Street! And behold! The peasant, it appeared, even knew all about Pettifoggers Street; had been there; his mouth had watered at it, but he had not had a taste of it! "And we are Generals from Pettifoggers Street, you know!" cried the Generals joyfully.
"And I, also, if you had only observed; a man hangs outside a house, in a box, from a rope, and washes the wall with color, or walks on the roof like a fly.

I am that man," replied the peasant.
And the peasant began to cut capers, as though to amuse his Generals, because they had been kind to him, an idle sluggard, and had not scorned his peasant toil.

And he built a ship--not a ship exactly, but a boat--so that they could sail across the ocean-sea, up to Pettifoggers Street.
"But look to it, you rascal, that you don't drown us!" said the Generals, when they saw the craft pitching on the waves.
"Be easy, Generals, this is not my first experience," replied the peasant, and began to make preparations for departure.
The peasant collected soft swansdown, and lined the bottom of the boat with it; having done this, he placed the Generals on the bottom, made the sign of the cross over them, and set sail.
The pen cannot describe, neither can the tongue relate, what terror the Generals suffered during their journey, from storms and divers winds.

But the peasant kept on rowing and rowing, and fed the Generals on herrings.
At last, behold Mother Neva, and the splendid Katherine Canal, and great Pettifoggers Street! The cook-maids clasped their hands in amazement at the sight of their Generals, so fat, white, and merry! The Generals drank their coffee, ate rolls made with milk, eggs, and butter, and put on their uniforms.
Then they went to the treasury, and the pen cannot describe, neither can the tongue relate, how much money they received there.
But they did not forget the peasant; they sent him a wineglass of vodka and a silver five-kopek piece.[41] "Make merry, big, coarse peasant!" While Turgeneff represented the "western" and liberal element (with a tinge of the "red") in the school of the '40's, and Gontcharoff stood for the bourgeois and opportunist ideals of the St.Petersburg bureaucrats, Count Lyeff Nikolaevitch Tolstoy penetrated more profoundly into the depths of the spirit of the times than any other writer of the period in the matter of analysis and skepticism which characterized that school, and carried them to the extremes of pitiless logic and radicalness, approaching more closely than any other to democratic and national ideals.

But notwithstanding all his genius, Count Tolstoy was not able to free himself to any great extent from his epoch, his environment, his contemporaries.