way in his box, and lay down again.

Marya came in again and began lighting the stove. She was evidently
hardly awake, and seemed dropping asleep as she walked. Probably she had
had some dream, or the stories of the night before came into her mind
as, stretching luxuriously before the stove, she said:

"No, freedom is better."

VII

The master arrived--that was what they called the police inspector. When
he would come and what he was coming for had been known for the last
week. There were only forty households in Zhukovo, but more than two
thousand roubles of arrears of rates and taxes had accumulated.

The police inspector stopped at the tavern. He drank there two glasses
of tea, and then went on foot to the village elder's hut, near which
a crowd of those who were in debt stood waiting. The elder, Antip
Syedelnikov, was, in spite of his youth--he was only a little over
thirty--strict and always on the side of the authorities, though he
himself was poor and did not pay his taxes regularly. Evidently he
enjoyed being elder, and liked the sense of authority, which he could
only display by strictness. In the village council the peasants were
afraid of him and obeyed him. It would sometimes happen that he would
pounce on a drunken man in the street or near the tavern, tie his hands
behind him, and put him in the lock-up. On one occasion he even put
Granny in the lock-up because she went to the village council instead
of Osip, and began swearing, and he kept her there for a whole day and
night. He had never lived in a town or read a book, but somewhere or
other had picked up various learned expressions, and loved to make use
of them in conversation, and he was respected for this though he was not
always understood.

When Osip came into the village elder's hut with his tax book, the
police inspector, a lean old man with a long grey beard, in a grey
tunic, was sitting at a table in the passage, writing something. It was
clean in the hut; all the walls were dotted with pictures cut out of
the illustrated papers, and in the most conspicuous place near the ikon
there was a portrait of the Battenburg who was the Prince of Bulgaria.
By the table stood Antip Syedelnikov with his arms folded.

"There is one hundred and nineteen roubles standing against him," he
said when it came to Osip's turn. "Before Easter he paid a rouble, and
he has not paid a kopeck since."

The police inspector raised his eyes to Osip and asked:

"