impossible to
apprehend them all; or do others assemble afresh when some are removed?

There are many varieties of beggars in Moscow: there are some who live by
this profession; there are also genuine poor people, who have chanced
upon Moscow in some manner or other, and who are really in want.

Among these poor people, there are many simple, common peasants, and
women in their peasant costume. I often met such people. Some of them
have fallen ill here, and on leaving the hospital they can neither
support themselves here, nor get away from Moscow. Some of them,
moreover, have indulged in dissipation (such was probably the case of the
dropsical man); some have not been ill, but are people who have been
burnt out of their houses, or old people, or women with children; some,
too, were perfectly healthy and able to work. These perfectly healthy
peasants who were engaged in begging, particularly interested me. These
healthy, peasant beggars, who were fit for work, also interested me,
because, from the date of my arrival in Moscow, I had been in the habit
of going to the Sparrow Hills with two peasants, and sawing wood there
for the sake of exercise. These two peasants were just as poor as those
whom I encountered on the streets. One was Piotr, a soldier from Kaluga;
the other Semyon, a peasant from Vladimir. They possessed nothing except
the wages of their body and hands. And with these hands they earned, by
dint of very hard labor, from forty to forty-five kopeks a day, out of
which each of them was laying by savings, the Kaluga man for a fur coat,
the Vladimir man in order to get enough to return to his village.
Therefore, on meeting precisely such men in the streets, I took an
especial interest in them.

Why did these men toil, while those others begged?

On encountering a peasant of this stamp, I usually asked him how he had
come to that situation. Once I met a peasant with some gray in his
beard, but healthy. He begs. I ask him who is he, whence comes he? He
says that he came from Kaluga to get work. At first he found employment
chopping up old wood for use in stoves. He and his comrade finished all
the chopping which one householder had; then they sought other work, but
found none; his comrade had parted from him, and for two weeks he himself
had been struggling along; he had spent all his money, he had no saw, and
no axe, and no money to buy anything. I gave him money for a saw, and
told him of a p