ttle under
twelve miles from the town. I walked. The cornfields, bathed in the
morning sunshine, were bright green. It was a flat, cheerful country,
and in the distance there were the distinct outlines of the station,
of ancient barrows, and far-away homesteads. . . . How nice it was
out there in the open! And how I longed to be filled with the sense
of freedom, if only for that one morning, that I might not think
of what was being done in the town, not think of my needs, not feel
hungry! Nothing has so marred my existence as an acute feeling of
hunger, which made images of buckwheat porridge, rissoles, and baked
fish mingle strangely with my best thoughts. Here I was standing
alone in the open country, gazing upward at a lark which hovered
in the air at the same spot, trilling as though in hysterics, and
meanwhile I was thinking: "How nice it would be to eat a piece of
bread and butter!"

Or I would sit down by the roadside to rest, and shut my eyes to
listen to the delicious sounds of May, and what haunted me was the
smell of hot potatoes. Though I was tall and strongly built, I had
as a rule little to eat, and so the predominant sensation throughout
the day was hunger, and perhaps that was why I knew so well how it
is that such multitudes of people toil merely for their daily bread,
and can talk of nothing but things to eat.

At Dubetchnya they were plastering the inside of the station, and
building a wooden upper storey to the pumping shed. It was hot;
there was a smell of lime, and the workmen sauntered listlessly
between the heaps of shavings and mortar rubble. The pointsman lay
asleep near his sentry box, and the sun was blazing full on his
face. There was not a single tree. The telegraph wire hummed faintly
and hawks were perching on it here and there. I, wandering, too,
among the heaps of rubbish, and not knowing what to do, recalled
how the engineer, in answer to my question what my duties would
consist in, had said: "We shall see when you are there"; but what
could one see in that wilderness?

The plasterers spoke of the foreman, and of a certain Fyodot Vasilyev.
I did not understand, and gradually I was overcome by depression
--the physical depression in which one is conscious of one's arms
and legs and huge body, and does not know what to do with them or
where to put them.

After I had been walking about for at least a couple of hours, I
noticed that there were telegraph poles running off to the right