, not because they had not,
so to speak, nourishing food, but because their stomachs had been
spoiled, and because their appetites demanded not nourishing but
irritating viands; and I did not perceive that, in order to help them, it
was not necessary to give them food, but that it was necessary to heal
their disordered stomachs. Although I am anticipating by so doing, I
will mention here, that, out of all these persons whom I noted down, I
really did not help a single one, in spite of the fact that for some of
them, that was done which they desired, and that which, apparently, might
have raised them. Three of their number were particularly well known to
me. All three, after repeated rises and falls, are now in precisely the
same situation in which they were three years ago.

CHAPTER VIII.

The second class of unfortunates whom I also expected to assist later on,
were the dissolute women; there were a very great many of them, of all
sorts, in the Rzhanoff house--from those who were young and who resembled
women, to old ones, who were frightful and horrible, and who had lost
every semblance of humanity. The hope of being of assistance to these
women, which I had not at first entertained, occurred to me later. This
was in the middle of our rounds. We had already worked out several
mechanical tricks of procedure.

When we entered a new establishment, we immediately questioned the
landlady of the apartment; one of us sat down, clearing some sort of a
place for himself where he could write, and another penetrated the
corners, and questioned each man in all the nooks of the apartment
separately, and reported the facts to the one who did the writing.

On entering a set of rooms in the basement, a student went to hunt up the
landlady, while I began to interrogate all who remained in the place. The
apartment was thus arranged: in the centre was a room six _arshins_
square, {59} and a small oven. From the oven radiated four partitions,
forming four tiny compartments. In the first, the entrance slip, which
had four bunks, there were two persons--an old man and a woman.
Immediately adjoining this, was a rather long slip of a room; in it was
the landlord, a young fellow, dressed in a sleeveless gray woollen
jacket, a good-looking, very pale citizen. {60} On the left of the first
corner, was a third tiny chamber; there was one person asleep there,
probably a drunken peasant, and a woman in a pink blouse which was lo