lace where he could find work. I had already made
arrangements with Piotr and Semyon, that they should take an assistant,
and they looked up a mate for him.

"See that you come. There is a great deal of work there."

"I will come; why should I not come? Do you suppose I like to beg? I
can work."

The peasant declares that he will come, and it seems to me that he is not
deceiving me, and that he intents to come.

On the following day I go to my peasants, and inquire whether that man
has arrived. He has not been there; and in this way several men deceived
me. And those also deceived me who said that they only required money
for a ticket in order to return home, and who chanced upon me again in
the street a week later. Many of these I recognized, and they recognized
me, and sometimes, having forgotten me, they repeated the same trick on
me; and others, on catching sight of me, beat a retreat. Thus I
perceived, that in the ranks of this class also deceivers existed. But
these cheats were very pitiable creatures: all of them were but
half-clad, poverty-stricken, gaunt, sickly men; they were the very people
who really freeze to death, or hang themselves, as we learn from the
newspapers.

CHAPTER II.

When I mentioned this poverty of the town to inhabitants of the town,
they always said to me: "Oh, all that you have seen is nothing. You
ought to see the Khitroff market-place, and the lodging-houses for the
night there. There you would see a regular 'golden company.'" {21a} One
jester told me that this was no longer a company, but a _golden
regiment_: so greatly had their numbers increased. The jester was right,
but he would have been still more accurate if he had said that these
people now form in Moscow neither a company nor a regiment, but an entire
army, almost fifty thousand in number, I think. [The old inhabitants,
when they spoke to me about the poverty in town, always referred to it
with a certain satisfaction, as though pluming themselves over me,
because they knew it. I remember that when I was in London, the old
inhabitants there also rather boasted when they spoke of the poverty of
London. The case is the same with us.] {21b}

And I wanted to have a sight of this poverty of which I had been told.
Several times I set out in the direction of the Khitroff market-place,
but on every occasion I began to feel uncomfortable and ashamed. "Why am
I going to gaze on the sufferings of people whom