ong
as it is warm and the women don't scold..." said Crutch, and he laughed.
"When I was young I was very fond of my Nastasya. She was a quiet woman.
And she used to be always at it: 'Buy a house, Makaritch! Buy a house,
Makaritch! Buy a house, Makaritch!' She was dying and yet she kept on
saying, 'Buy yourself a racing droshky, Makaritch, that you may not have
to walk.' And I bought her nothing but gingerbread."

"Her husband's deaf and stupid," Yakov went on, not hearing Crutch; "a
regular fool, just like a goose. He can't understand anything. Hit a
goose on the head with a stick and even then it does not understand."

Crutch got up to go home to the factory. Yakov also got up, and both of
them went off together, still talking. When they had gone fifty paces
old Tsybukin got up, too, and walked after them, stepping uncertainly as
though on slippery ice.

The village was already plunged in the dusk of evening and the sun only
gleamed on the upper part of the road which ran wriggling like a snake
up the slope. Old women were coming back from the woods and children
with them; they were bringing baskets of mushrooms. Peasant women and
girls came in a crowd from the station where they had been loading the
trucks with bricks, and their noses and their cheeks under their eyes
were covered with red brick-dust. They were singing. Ahead of them all
was Lipa singing in a high voice, with her eyes turned upwards to the
sky, breaking into trills as though triumphant and ecstatic that at
last the day was over and she could rest. In the crowd was her mother
Praskovya, who was walking with a bundle in her arms and breathless as
usual.

"Good-evening, Makaritch!" cried Lipa, seeing Crutch. "Good-evening,
darling!"

"Good-evening, Lipinka," cried Crutch delighted. "Dear girls and women,
love the rich carpenter! Ho-ho! My little children, my little children.
(Crutch gave a gulp.) My dear little axes!"

Crutch and Yakov went on further and could still be heard talking. Then
after them the crowd was met by old Tsybukin and there was a sudden
hush. Lipa and Praskovya had dropped a little behind, and when the old
man was on a level with them Lipa bowed down low and said:

"Good-evening, Grigory Petrovitch."

Her mother, too, bowed down. The old man stopped and, saying nothing,
looked at the two in silence; his lips were quivering and his eyes
full of tears. Lipa took out of her mother's bundle a piece of savoury
turnover and gave