world
and every kind of abomination. Not we sinners only; even the saints
themselves have been led astray by them. Mashenka did not try to keep
me at a distance. Instead of thinking of her husband and being on her
guard, she fell in love with me. I began to notice that she was dull
without me, and was always walking to and fro by the fence looking into
my yard through the cracks.

"My brains were going round in my head in a sort of frenzy. On Thursday
in Holy Week I was going early in the morning--it was scarcely light--to
market. I passed close by her gate, and the Evil One was by me--at my
elbow. I looked--she had a gate with open trellis work at the top--and
there she was, up already, standing in the middle of the yard, feeding
the ducks. I could not restrain myself, and I called her name. She came
up and looked at me through the trellis.... Her little face was white,
her eyes soft and sleepy-looking.... I liked her looks immensely, and
I began paying her compliments, as though we were not at the gate, but
just as one does on namedays, while she blushed, and laughed, and kept
looking straight into my eyes without winking.... I lost all sense and
began to declare my love to her.... She opened the gate, and from that
morning we began to live as man and wife...."

The hunchback Alyoshka came into the yard from the street and ran out of
breath into the house, not looking at any one. A minute later he ran out
of the house with a concertina. Jingling some coppers in his pocket, and
cracking sunflower seeds as he ran, he went out at the gate.

"And who's that, pray?" asked Matvey Savitch.

"My son Alexey," answered Dyudya. "He's off on a spree, the rascal. God
has afflicted him with a hump, so we are not very hard on him."

"And he's always drinking with the other fellows, always drinking,"
sighed Afanasyevna. "Before Carnival we married him, thinking he'd be
steadier, but there! he's worse than ever."

"It's been no use. Simply keeping another man's daughter for nothing,"
said Dyudya.

Somewhere behind the church they began to sing a glorious, mournful
song. The words they could not catch and only the voices could be
heard--two tenors and a bass. All were listening; there was complete
stillness in the yard.... Two voices suddenly broke off with a loud roar
of laughter, but the third, a tenor, still sang on, and took so high a
note that every one instinctively looked upwards, as though the voice
had soared to heave