EVERY morning at six o’clock I set out tor my work in the market-place. I met interesting people there. There was the carpenter, Osip, a gray-haired man who looked like Saint Nikolai, a clever workman, and witty; there was the humpbacked slater, Ephimushka, the pious bricklayer, Petr, a thoughtful man who also reminded me of a saint; the plasterer, Gregory Shishlin, a flaxen-bearded, blue-eyed, handsome man, beaming with quiet good-nature.

I had come to know these people during the second part of my life at the draughtsman’s house. Every Sunday they used to appear in the kitchen, grave, important-looking, with pleasant speech, and with words which had a new flavor for me. All these solid-looking peasants had seemed to me then to be easy to read, good through and through, all pleasantly different from the spiteful, thieving, drunken inhabitants of the Kunavin and its environs.

The plasterer, Shishlin, pleased me most of all, and I actually asked if I might join his gang of workmen. But scratching his golden brow with a white finger, he gently refused to have me.

“It is too soon for you,” he said. “Our work is not easy; wait another year.”

Then throwing up his handsome head, he asked:

“You don’t like the way you are living? Never mind, have patience; learn to live a life of your own, and then you will be able to bear it!”

I do not know all that I gained from this good advice, but I remember it gratefully.

These people used to come to my master’s house every Sunday morning, sit on benches round the kitchen-table, and talk of interesting things while they waited for my master. When he came, he greeted them loudly and gayly, shaking their strong hands, and then sat down in the chief corner. They produced their accounts and bundles of notes, the workmen placed their tattered account-books on the table, and the reckoning up for the week began.

Joking and bantering, the master would try to prove them wrong in their reckoning, and they did the same to him. Sometimes there was a fierce dispute, but more often friendly laughter.

“Eh, you’re a dear man; you were born a rogue!” the workmen would say to the master.

And he answered, laughing in some confusion:

“And what about you, wild fowl? There’s as much roguery about you as about me!”

“How should we be anything else, friend?” agreed Ephimushka, but grave Petr said:

“You live by what you steal; what you earn you give to God and the emperor.”

“Well, then I’ll willingly make a burnt offering of you,” laughed the master.

They led him on good-naturedly:

“Set fire to us, you mean?”

“Burn us in a fiery furnace?”

Gregory Shishlin, pressing his luxuriant beard to his breast with his hands, said in a sing-song voice:

“Brothers, let us do our business without cheating. If we will only live honestly, how happy and peaceful we shall be, eh? Shall we not, dear people?”

His blue eyes darkened, grew moist; at that moment he looked wonderfully handsome. His question seemed to have upset them all; they all turned away from him in confusion.

“A peasant does not cheat much,” grumbled good-looking Osip with a sigh, as if he pitied the peasant.

The dark bricklayer, bending his round-shouldered back over the table, said thickly:

“Sin is like a sort of bog; the farther you go, the more swampy it gets!”

And the master said to them, as if he were making a speech:

“What about me? I go into it because something calls me. Though I don’t want to.”

After this philosophising they again tried to get the better of one another, but when they had finished their accounts, perspiring and tired from the effort, they went out to the tavern to drink tea, inviting the master to go with them.

On the market-place it was my duty to watch these people, to see that they did not steal nails, or bricks, or boards. Every one of them, in addition to my master’s work, held contracts of his own, and would try to steal something for his own work under my very nose.

They welcomed me kindly, and Shishlin said:

“Do you remember how you wanted to come into my gang? And look at you now; put over me as chief!”

“Well, well,” said Osip bantcringly, “keep watch over the river-banks, and may God help you!”

Petr observed in an unfriendly tone:

“They have put a young crane to watch old mice.”

My duties were a cruel trial to me. I felt ashamed in the presence of these people. They all seemd to possess some special knowledge which was hidden from the rest of the world, and I had to watch them as if they had been thieves and tricksters. The first part of the time it was very hard for me, but Osip soon noticed this, and one day he said to me privately:

“Look here, young fellow, you won’t do any good by sulking — understand?”

Of course I did not understand, but I felt that he realized the absurdity of my position, and I soon arrived at a frank understanding with him.

He took me aside in a corner and explained:

“If you want to know, the biggest thief among us is the bricklayer, Petrukha. He is a man with a large family, and he is greedy. You want to watch him well. Nothing is too small for him; everything comes in handy. A pound of nails, a dozen of bricks, a bag of mortar — he’ll take all. He is a good man. God-fearing, of severe ideas, and well educated, but he loves to steal! Ephimushka lives like a woman.

He is peaceable, and is harmless as far as you are concerned. He is clever, too — humpbacks are never fools! And there’s Gregory Shishlin. He has a fad — he will neither take from others nor give of his own. He works for nothing; any one can take him in, but he can deceive no one. He is not governed by his reason.”

“He is good, then?”

Osip looked at me as if I were a long way from him, and uttered these memorable words:

“True enough, he is good. To be good is the easiest way for lazy people. To be good, my boy, does not need brains.”

“And what about you?” I asked Osip.

He laughed and answered:

“I? I am like a young girl. When I am a grandmother I will tell you all about myself; till then you will have to wait. In the meanwhile you can set your brains to work to find out where the real T is hidden. Find out; that is what you have to do!”

He had upset all my ideas of himself and his friends.

It was difficult for me to doubt the truth of his statement. I saw that Ephimushka, Petr, and Gregory regarded the handsome old man as more clever and more learned in worldly wisdom than themselves. They took counsel with him about everything, listened attentively to his advice, and showed him every sign of respect.

“Will you be so good as to give us your advice,” they would ask him. But after one of these questions, when Osip had gone away, the bricklayer said softly to Grigori:

“Heretic!”

And Grigori burst out laughing and added:

“Clown!”

The plasterer warned me in a friendly way:

“You look out for yourself with the old man, Maximich. You must be careful, or he will twist you round his finger in an hour; he is a bitter old man. God save you from the harm he can do.”

“What harm?”

“That I can’t say!” answered the handsome workman, blinking.

I did not understand him in the least. I thought that the most honest and pious man of them all was the bricklayer, Petr; He spoke of everything briefly, suggestively; his thoughts rested mostly upon God, hell, and death.

“Ekh! my children, my brothers, how can you not be afraid”? How can you not look forward, when the grave and the churchyard let no one pass them?”

He always had the stomachache, and there were some days when he could not eat anything at all. Even a morsel of bread brought on the pain to such an extent as to cause convulsions and a dreadful sickness.

Humpbacked Ephimushka also seemed a very good and honest, but always queer fellow. Sometimes he was happy and foolish, like a harmless lunatic. He was everlastingly falling in love with different women, about whom he always used the same words:

“I tell you straight, she is not a woman, but a flower in cream — ei, bo — o!”

When the lively women of Kunavin Street came to wash the floors in the shops, Ephimushka let himself down from the roof, and standing in a corner somewhere, mumbled, blinking his gray, bright eyes, stretch — ing his mouth from ear to ear:

“Such a butterfly as the Lord has sent to me; such a joy has descended upon me! Well, what is she but a flower in cream, and grateful I ought to be for the chance which has brought me such a gift! Such beauty makes me full of life, afire!”

At first the women used to laugh at him, calling out to each other:

“Listen to the humpback running on! Oh Lord!”

The slater caused no little laughter. His high cheek-boned face wore a sleepy expression, and he used to talk as if he were raving, his honeyed phrases flowing in an intoxicating stream which obviously went to the women’s heads. At length one of the elder ones said to her friend in a tone of amazement:

“Just listen to how that man is going on! A clean young fellow he is!”

“He sings like a bird.”

“Or like a beggar in the church porch,” said an obstinate girl, refusing to give way.

But Ephimushka was not like a beggar at all. He stood firmly, like a squat tree-trunk; his voice rang out like a challenge; his words became more and more alluring; the women listened to him in silence. In fact, it seemed as if his whole being was flowing away in a tender, narcotic speech.

It ended in his saying to his mates in a tone of astonishment at supper-time, or after the Sabbath rest, shak — ing his heavy, angular head:

“Well, what a sweet little woman, a dear little thing! I have never before come across anything like her!”

When he spoke of his conquests Ephimushka was not boastful, nor jeered at the victim of his charms, as the others always did. He was only joyfully and gratefully touched, his gray eyes wide open with astonishment.

Osip, shaking his head, exclaimed:

“Oh, you incorrigible fellow! How old are you?”

“Forty — four years, but that’s nothing! I have grown five years younger today, as if I had bathed in the healing water of a river. I feel thoroughly fit, and my heart is at peace! Some women can produce that effect, diV

The bricklayer said coarsely:

“You are going on for fifty. You had better be careful, or you will find that your loose way of life will leave a bitter taste.”

“You are shameless, Ephimushka!” sighed Grigori Shishlin.

And it seemed to — me that the handsome fellow envied the success of the humpback.

Osip looked round on us all from under his level silver brows, and said jestingly:

“Every Mashka has her fancies. One will love cups and spoons, another buckles and earrings, but all Mashkas will be grandmothers in time.”

Shishlin was married, but his wife was living in the country, so he also cast his eyes on the floorscrubbers. They were all of them easy of approach. All of them “earned a bit” to add to their income, and they regarded this method of earning money in that poverty — stricken area as simply as they would have regarded any other kind of work. But the handsome workman never approached the women. He just gazed at them from afar with a peculiar expression, as if he were pitying some one — himself or them. But when they be — gan to sport with him and tempt him, he laughed bash — fully and went away.

“Well, you —”

“What’s the matter with you, you fool?” asked Ephimushka, amazed. “Do you mean to say you are going to lose the chance?”

“I am a married man,” Grigori reminded him.

“Well, do you think your wife will know anything about it?”

“My wife would always know if I lived unchastely. I can’t deceive her, my brother.”

“How can she know?”

“That I can’t say, but she is bound to know, while she lives chaste herself; and if I lead a chaste life, and she were to sin, I should know it.”

“But how?” cried Ephimushka, but Grigori repeated calmly:

“That I can’t say.”

The slater waved his hands agitatedly.

“There, if you please! Chaste, and doesn’t know! Oh, you blockhead!”

Shishlin’s workmen, numbering seven, treated him as one of themselves and not as their master, and behind his back they nicknamed him “The Calf.”

When he came to work and saw that they were lazy, he would take a trowel, or a spade, and artistically do the work himself, calling out coaxingly:

“Set to work, children, set to work!”

One day, carrying out the task which my master had angrily set me, I said to Grigori:

“What bad workmen you have.”

He seemed surprised.

“Why?”

“This work ought to have been finished yesterday, and they won’t finish it even today.”

“That is true; they won’t have time,” he agreed, and after a silence he added cautiously:

“Of course, I see that by rights I ought to dismiss them, but you see they are all my own people from my own village. And then again the punishment of God is that every man should eat bread by the sweat of his brow, and the punishment is for all of us — for you and me, too. But you and I labor less than they do, and — well, it would be awkward to dismiss them.”

He lived in a dream. He would walk along the deserted streets of the market-place, and suddenly halt — ing on one of the bridges over the Obvodni Canal, would stand for a long time at the railings, looking into the water, at the sky, or into the distance beyond the Oka. If one overtook him and asked:

“What are you doing?”

“What?” he would reply, waking up and smiling confusedly. “I was just standing, looking about me a bit.”

“God has arranged everything very well, brother,” he would often say. “The sky, the earth, the flowing rivers, the steamboats running. You can get on a boat and go where you like — to Riazan, or to Ribinsk, to Perm, to Astrakhan. I went to Riazan once. It wasn’t bad — a little town — but very dull, duller than Nijni. Our Nijni is wonderful, gay! And Astrakhan is still duller. There are a lot of Kalmucks there, and I don’t like them. I don’t like any of those Mordovans, or Kalmucks, Persians, or Germans, or any of the other nations.”

He spoke slowly; his words cautiously felt for sympathy in others, and always found it in the bricklayer, Petr.

“Those are not nations, but nomads,” said Petr with angry conviction. “They came into the world before Christ and they’ll go out of it before He comes again.”

Grigori became animated; he beamed.

“That’s it, isn’t it? But I love a pure race like the Russians, my brother, with a straight look. I don’t like Jews, either, and I cannot understand how they are the people of God. It is wisely arranged, no doubt.”

The slater added darkly:

“Wisely — but there is a lot that is superfluous!”

Osip listened to what they said, and then put in, mockingly and caustically:

“There is much that is superfluous, and your conversation belongs to that category. Ekh! you bab — blers; you want a thrashing, all of you!”

Osip kept himself to himself, and it was impossible to guess with whom he would agree, or with whom he would quarrel. Sometimes he seemed inclined to agree calmly with all men, and with all their ideas; but more often one saw that he was bored by all of them, regarding them as half-witted, and he said to Petr, Grigori, and Ephimushka:

“Ekh, you sow’s whelps!”

They laughed, not very cheerfully or willingly, but still they laughed.

My master gave me five copecks a day for food. This was not enough, and I was rather hungry. Seeing this, the workmen invited me to breakfast and sup — per with them, and sometimes the contractors would invite me to a tavern to drink tea with them. I willingly accepted the invitations. I loved to sit among them and listen to their slow speeches, their strange stories. I gave them great pleasure by my readings out of church books.

“You ‘ve stuck to books till you are fed up with them. Your crop is stuffed with them,” said Osip, regarding me attentively with his cornflower-blue eyes. It was difficult to catch their expression; his pupils always seemed to be floating, melting.

“Take it ............