eyebrows overhanging
his closed eyes. . . . The nose and the cheeks and the eyebrows,
all the features, each taken separately, were coarse and heavy,
like the furniture and the stove in the "travellers' room," but
taken all together they gave the effect of something harmonious and
even beautiful. Such is the lucky star, as it is called, of the
Russian face: the coarser and harsher its features the softer and
more good-natured it looks. The man was dressed in a gentleman's
reefer jacket, shabby, but bound with wide new braid, a plush
waistcoat, and full black trousers thrust into big high boots.

On one of the benches, which stood in a continuous row along the
wall, a girl of eight, in a brown dress and long black stockings,
lay asleep on a coat lined with fox. Her face was pale, her hair
was flaxen, her shoulders were narrow, her whole body was thin and
frail, but her nose stood out as thick and ugly a lump as the man's.
She was sound asleep, and unconscious that her semi-circular comb
had fallen off her head and was cutting her cheek.

The "travellers' room" had a festive appearance. The air was full
of the smell of freshly scrubbed floors, there were no rags hanging
as usual on the line that ran diagonally across the room, and a
little lamp was burning in the corner over the table, casting a
patch of red light on the ikon of St. George the Victorious. From
the ikon stretched on each side of the corner a row of cheap
oleographs, which maintained a strict and careful gradation in the
transition from the sacred to the profane. In the dim light of the
candle end and the red ikon lamp the pictures looked like one
continuous stripe, covered with blurs of black. When the tiled
stove, trying to sing in unison with the weather, drew in the air
with a howl, while the logs, as though waking up, burst into bright
flame and hissed angrily, red patches began dancing on the log
walls, and over the head of the sleeping man could be seen first
the Elder Seraphim, then the Shah Nasir-ed-Din, then a fat, brown
baby with goggle eyes, whispering in the ear of a young girl with
an extraordinarily blank, and indifferent face. . . .

Outside a storm was raging. Something frantic and wrathful, but
profoundly unhappy, seemed to be flinging itself about the tavern
with the ferocity of a wild beast and trying to break in. Banging
at the doors, knocking at the windows and on the roof, scratching
at the walls, it alternately threatened and be