Book 1 Chapter 2 Slovas Early Life

The story of the prisoner Maslova's life was a very common one.

Maslova's mother was the unmarried daughter of a village woman,
employed on a dairy farm, which belonged to two maiden ladies who
were landowners. This unmarried woman had a baby every year, and,
as often happens among the village people, each one of these
undesired babies, after it had been carefully baptised, was
neglected by its mother, whom it hindered at her work, and left
to starve. Five children had died in this way. They had all been
baptised and then not sufficiently fed, and just left to die.
The sixth baby, whose father was a gipsy tramp, would have shared
the same fate, had it not so happened that one of the maiden
ladies came into the farmyard to scold the dairymaids for sending
up cream that smelt of the cow. The young woman was lying in the
cowshed with a fine, healthy, new-born baby. The old maiden lady
scolded the maids again for allowing the woman (who had just been
confined) to lie in the cowshed, and was about to go away, but
seeing the baby her heart was touched, and she offered to stand
godmother to the little girl, and pity for her little
god-daughter induced her to give milk and a little money to the
mother, so that she should feed the baby; and the little girl
lived. The old ladies spoke of her as "the saved one." When the
child was three years old, her mother fell ill and died, and the
maiden ladies took the child from her old grandmother, to whom
she was nothing but a burden.