n will take no pleasure in anything but vodka
and lewd talk, but when I have time I sit in a corner and read a book. I
read and I weep and weep."

"What do you weep for?"

"They write so pathetically! For some books one gives but a five-kopeck
piece, and yet one weeps and sighs exceedingly over it."

"Is your father dead?" asked Ptaha.

"I don't know, good man. I don't know my parent; it is no use concealing
it. I judge that I was mamma's illegitimate son. My mamma lived all her
life with the gentry, and did not want to marry a simple peasant...."

"And so she fell into the master's hands," laughed Ptaha.

"She did transgress, that's true. She was pious, God-fearing, but she
did not keep her maiden purity. It is a sin, of course, a great sin,
there's no doubt about it, but to make up for it there is, maybe, noble
blood in me. Maybe I am only a peasant by class, but in nature a noble
gentleman."

The "noble gentleman" uttered all this in a soft, sugary tenor,
wrinkling up his narrow forehead and emitting creaking sounds from his
red, frozen little nose. Ptaha listened and looked askance at him in
wonder, continually shrugging his shoulders.

After going nearly five miles the constables and the tramp sat down on a
mound to rest.

"Even a dog knows his name," Ptaha muttered. "My name is Andryushka,
his is Nikandr; every man has his holy name, and it can't be forgotten.
Nohow."

"Who has any need to know my name?" sighed the tramp, leaning his cheek
on his fist. "And what advantage would it be to me if they did know it?
If I were allowed to go where I would--but it would only make things
worse. I know the law, Christian brothers. Now I am a tramp who doesn't
remember his name, and it's the very most if they send me to Eastern
Siberia and give me thirty or forty lashes; but if I were to tell them
my real name and description they would send me back to hard labour, I
know!"

"Why, have you been a convict?"

"I have, dear friend. For four years I went about with my head shaved
and fetters on my legs."

"What for?"

"For murder, my good man! When I was still a boy of eighteen or so,
my mamma accidentally poured arsenic instead of soda and acid into my
master's glass. There were boxes of all sorts in the storeroom, numbers
of them; it was easy to make a mistake over them."

The tramp sighed, shook his head, and said:

"She was a pious woman, but, who knows? another man's soul is a
slumbering forest! It may