ed without a bridge..." said Volodka gloomily. "We lived without
a bridge, and did not ask for one... and we don't want it...."

No one answered him and they walked on in silence with drooping heads.

DREAMS

Two peasant constables--one a stubby, black-bearded individual with such
exceptionally short legs that if you looked at him from behind it seemed
as though his legs began much lower down than in other people; the
other, long, thin, and straight as a stick, with a scanty beard of dark
reddish colour--were escorting to the district town a tramp who refused
to remember his name. The first waddled along, looking from side to
side, chewing now a straw, now his own sleeve, slapping himself on the
haunches and humming, and altogether had a careless and frivolous air;
the other, in spite of his lean face and narrow shoulders, looked solid,
grave, and substantial; in the lines and expression of his whole figure
he was like the priests among the Old Believers, or the warriors who
are painted on old-fashioned ikons. "For his wisdom God had added to
his forehead"--that is, he was bald--which increased the resemblance
referred to. The first was called Andrey Ptaha, the second Nikandr
Sapozhnikov.

The man they were escorting did not in the least correspond with the
conception everyone has of a tramp. He was a frail little man, weak
and sickly-looking, with small, colourless, and extremely indefinite
features. His eyebrows were scanty, his expression mild and submissive;
he had scarcely a trace of a moustache, though he was over thirty.
He walked along timidly, bent forward, with his hands thrust into his
sleeves. The collar of his shabby cloth overcoat, which did not look
like a peasant's, was turned up to the very brim of his cap, so that
only his little red nose ventured to peep out into the light of day. He
spoke in an ingratiating tenor, continually coughing. It was very, very
difficult to believe that he was a tramp concealing his surname. He was
more like an unsuccessful priest's son, stricken by God and reduced to
beggary; a clerk discharged for drunkenness; a merchant's son or nephew
who had tried his feeble powers in a theatrical career, and was now
going home to play the last act in the parable of the prodigal son;
perhaps, judging by the dull patience with which he struggled with the
hopeless autumn mud, he might have been a fanatical monk, wandering from
one Russian monastery to another, continually seeking