lept in close, stuffy bedrooms, on wooden bedsteads infested
with bugs; their children were kept in revoltingly dirty rooms
called nurseries, and the servants, even the old and respected ones,
slept on the floor in the kitchen, covered with rags. On ordinary
days the houses smelt of beetroot soup, and on fast days of sturgeon
cooked in sunflower oil. The food was not good, and the drinking
water was unwholesome. In the town council, at the governor's, at
the head priest's, on all sides in private houses, people had been
saying for years and years that our town had not a good and cheap
water-supply, and that it was necessary to obtain a loan of two
hundred thousand from the Treasury for laying on water; very rich
people, of whom three dozen could have been counted up in our town,
and who at times lost whole estates at cards, drank the polluted
water, too, and talked all their lives with great excitement of a
loan for the water-supply--and I did not understand that; it
seemed to me it would have been simpler to take the two hundred
thousand out of their own pockets and lay it out on that object.

I did not know one honest man in the town. My father took bribes,
and imagined that they were given him out of respect for his moral
qualities; at the high school, in order to be moved up rapidly from
class to class, the boys went to board with their teachers, who
charged them exorbitant sums; the wife of the military commander
took bribes from the recruits when they were called up before the
board and even deigned to accept refreshments from them, and on one
occasion could not get up from her knees in church because she was
drunk; the doctors took bribes, too, when the recruits came up for
examination, and the town doctor and the veterinary surgeon levied
a regular tax on the butchers' shops and the restaurants; at the
district school they did a trade in certificates, qualifying for
partial exemption from military service; the higher clergy took
bribes from the humbler priests and from the church elders; at the
Municipal, the Artisans', and all the other Boards every petitioner
was pursued by a shout: "Don't forget your thanks!" and the petitioner
would turn back to give sixpence or a shilling. And those who did
not take bribes, such as the higher officials of the Department of
Justice, were haughty, offered two fingers instead of shaking hands,
were distinguished by the frigidity and narrowness of their judgments,
spent a grea