Answer me! You are silent? Your silence means you obviously agree. Since this is the case, my pretty one, you will have to beat your fiancé for having taught you how to steal!”

“I won’t,” the girl whispered.

“Just a little. Fools must be taught a lesson. Go on, beat him, my pretty one. You won’t? Well, in that case I shall have to ask Karpushka and Matvei to give you a little beating with those nettles over there. Shall I?”

“I won’t,” the girl repeated.

“Karpushka, come over here, will you?”

The girl flew at the boy and slapped him. The boy smiled foolishly and began to cry.

“That was excellent, my dear. Now pull his hair. Go to it, my dear. What, you won’t? Karpushka, can you come here, please?”

The girl grabbed her betrothed by the hair.

“Don’t hold back, I want it to hurt! Pull harder!”

The girl began pulling. Karpushka bubbled over with delight.

“That will do,” Trifon Semyonovich said to the girl. “Thank you for doing your bit to punish evil, my pretty one. And now,” he said, turning to the young man, “I want you to teach your fiancée a lesson. I want you to do to her what she has done to you.”

“Please, Your Lordship, by God . . . why should I beat her?”

“Why? Didn’t she just beat you? Now beat her! It will do her a world of good. You won’t? Well, there’s nothing for it. Karpushka, go get Matvei, will you?”

The boy spat, gasped, seized his fiancée’s braid, and began doing his bit to punish evil. Without realizing it he fell into a trance, got carried away, and forgot that it was not Trifon Semyonovich he was beating, but his betrothed. The girl shrieked. The beating went on for a long time. God knows where it would have ended if Trifon Semyonovich’s pretty daughter Sashenka had not appeared through the bushes.

“Papa dear, do come and have some tea!” she called, and seeing her dear papa’s little caper, burst into peals of laughter.

“That’ll do, you can go now,” Trifon Semyonovich said to the girl and boy with a low bow. “Goodbye. I’ll send you some nice little apples for your wedding.”

The girl and the boy went off—the boy to the right, the girl to the left. From that day on they never met again. Had Sashenka not appeared when she did, they might have been whipped with nettles too. This is how Trifon Semyonovich amuses himself in his old age.