X + 

Charles Beaumont, like the average Charles, John, James, and William, did not care to indulge in intimacies or personal confidences; but on being asked, he related his story briefly, but very plainly. His family, he said, was from Canada; and in Canada almost half the population consisted of the descendants of French colonists; his family was one of these, and therefore his name was of French origin, and his face was more like a Frenchman’s than an Englishman’s or Yankee’s. But, he continued, his grandfather emigrated from the vicinity of Quebec to New York; it often happened so. At the time of this emigration his father was a child. Afterwards, of course, he grew up and became a grown-up man; and at this time a certain rich man, with advanced ideas of agriculture, determined to establish on the southern shores of the Crimea instead of vineyards a cotton plantation; he commissioned someone to find him a manager in North America. James Beaumont was recommended to him⁠—a Canadian by birth, a resident of New York, and a man who had all his life been as many versts from a cotton plantation as you or I, reader, who live at Petersburg or Kursk, have been from Mount Ararat. This is the usual experience of such progressionists. It is true that it was not the fault of the American manager’s absolute ignorance of cotton plantations that his plan was ruined, because to plant cotton in the Crimea is as absurd as it would be to establish vineyards in Petersburg. And when this was found out, the American manager was discharged from the cotton plantation, and found a position as distiller in a factory in the government of Tambof. Here he lived all his life; here his son Charles was born, and soon after that he buried his wife. When he was about sixty-five years old, having accumulated a little money for his declining years, he determined to return to America, and he left. Charles was then twenty years old. When his father died, Charles made up his mind to come back to Russia, because, since he had been born and had lived twenty years in a village of the government of Tambof, he felt that he was a Russian. He had lived with his father in New York and had been a clerk in a merchant’s office. When his father died, he went to the New York office of the London firm of Hodgson, Lotter and Company, because he knew that this house had business with Petersburg, and after he had succeeded in making himself useful, he expressed a desire to get a place in Russia, explaining that he knew Russia, it being his native land. To have such an agent in Russia was of course advantageous for the firm; he was transferred to the London office for a trial, and some six months before his dinner with Pólozof, he came to Petersburg as an agent for the firm for the purchase of stearine and tallow, with a salary of five hundred pounds. In perfect agreement with this tale, Beaumont, who was born and had lived in the government of Tambof till he was twenty years old, with only one American or Englishman in a circle of twenty or fifty or one hundred versts around, with his father, who had been all day long in the factory; in conformity with this tale, Charles Beaumont spoke Russian like a native Russian, and English fairly well, very well, but not distinctly, as is likely to be the case with a man who has lived in the land of the English tongue only a few years after reaching maturity. + 