from the station, and that they ended a mile or a mile and a half
away at a white stone wall. The workmen told me the office was
there, and at last I reflected that that was where I ought to go.

It was a very old manor house, deserted long ago. The wall round
it, of porous white stone, was mouldering and had fallen away in
places, and the lodge, the blank wall of which looked out on the
open country, had a rusty roof with patches of tin-plate gleaming
here and there on it. Within the gates could be seen a spacious
courtyard overgrown with rough weeds, and an old manor house with
sunblinds on the windows, and a high roof red with rust. Two lodges,
exactly alike, stood one on each side of the house to right and to
left: one had its windows nailed up with boards; near the other,
of which the windows were open, there was washing on the line, and
there were calves moving about. The last of the telegraph poles
stood in the courtyard, and the wire from it ran to the window of
the lodge, of which the blank wall looked out into the open country.
The door stood open; I went in. By the telegraph apparatus a gentleman
with a curly dark head, wearing a reefer coat made of sailcloth,
was sitting at a table; he glanced at me morosely from under his
brows, but immediately smiled and said:

"Hullo, Better-than-nothing!"

It was Ivan Tcheprakov, an old schoolfellow of mine, who had been
expelled from the second class for smoking. We used at one time,
during autumn, to catch goldfinches, finches, and linnets together,
and to sell them in the market early in the morning, while our
parents were still in their beds. We watched for flocks of migrating
starlings and shot at them with small shot, then we picked up those
that were wounded, and some of them died in our hands in terrible
agonies (I remember to this day how they moaned in the cage at
night); those that recovered we sold, and swore with the utmost
effrontery that they were all cocks. On one occasion at the market
I had only one starling left, which I had offered to purchasers in
vain, till at last I sold it for a farthing. "Anyway, it's better
than nothing," I said to comfort myself, as I put the farthing in
my pocket, and from that day the street urchins and the schoolboys
called after me: "Better-than-nothing"; and to this day the street
boys and the shopkeepers mock at me with the nickname, though no
one remembers how it arose.

Tcheprakov was not of robust constitution: