out gaily from below, addressing Simeon, "Is
it bye-bye for Roly-Poly?"

"Yes, it must be the finish," answered Simeon. "We've got to throw him
out into the street in the meantime, fellows, or else the spirits will
start haunting. The devil with him, let 'em think that he drank himself
full and croaked on the road."

"But you didn't ... well, now? ... You didn't do for him?"

"Well, now, there's foolish talk! If there'd only been some reason. He
was a harmless fellow. Altogether like a little lamb. It must be just
that his turn came."

"And didn't he find a place where to die! Couldn't he have thought up
something worse?" said the one who was in the red shirt.

"Right you are, there!" seconded the other. "Lived to grin and died in
sin. Well, let's go, mate, what?"

The cadets ran with all their might. Now, in the darkness, the figure
of Roly-Poly drawn up on the floor, with his blue face, appeared before
them in all the horror that the dead possess for early youth; and
especially if recalled at night, in the dark.

CHAPTER IV.

A fine rain, like dust, obstinate and tedious, had been drizzling since
morning. Platonov was working in the port at the unloading of
watermelons. At the mill, where he had since the very summer proposed
to establish himself, luck had turned against him; after a week he had
already quarreled, and almost had a fight, with the foreman, who was
extremely brutal with the workers. About a month Sergei Ivanovich had
struggled along somehow from hand to mouth, somewheres in the
back-yards of Temnikovskaya Street, dragging into the editorial rooms
of The Echoes, from time to time, notes of street accidents or little
humorous scenes from the court rooms of the justices of the peace. But
the hard newspaper game had long ago grown distasteful to him. He was
always drawn to adventures, to physical labour in the fresh air, to
life completely devoid of even the least hint at comfort; to care-free
vagabondage, in which a man, having cast from him all possible external
conditions, does not know himself what is going to be with him on the
morrow. And for that reason, when from the lower stretches of the
Dnieper the first barges with watermelons started coming in, he
willingly entered a gang of labourers, in which he was known even from
last year, and loved for his merry nature, for his comradely spirit,
and for his masterly ability of keeping count.

This labour was carried on with good team w