f to sleep more soundly than ever.

The student looked at the pond which gleamed near the house and
thought of the carp and the pike which find it possible to live in cold
water....

"It's against the regulations to take anyone with the post...." the
postman said unexpectedly. "It's not allowed! And since it is not
allowed, people have no business... to get in.... Yes. It makes no
difference to me, it's true, only I don't like it, and I don't wish it."

"Why didn't you say so before, if you don't like it?"

The postman made no answer but still had an unfriendly, angry
expression. When, a little later, the horses stopped at the entrance of
the station the student thanked him and got out of the cart. The mail
train had not yet come in. A long goods train stood in a siding; in the
tender the engine driver and his assistant, with faces wet with dew,
were drinking tea from a dirty tin teapot. The carriages, the platforms,
the seats were all wet and cold. Until the train came in the student
stood at the buffet drinking tea while the postman, with his hands
thrust up his sleeves and the same look of anger still on his face,
paced up and down the platform in solitude, staring at the ground under
his feet.

With whom was he angry? Was it with people, with poverty, with the
autumn nights?

THE NEW VILLA

I

Two miles from the village of Obrutchanovo a huge bridge was being
built. From the village, which stood up high on the steep river-bank,
its trellis-like skeleton could be seen, and in foggy weather and
on still winter days, when its delicate iron girders and all the
scaffolding around was covered with hoar frost, it presented a
picturesque and even fantastic spectacle. Kutcherov, the engineer who
was building the bridge, a stout, broad-shouldered, bearded man in a
soft crumpled cap drove through the village in his racing droshky or his
open carriage. Now and then on holidays navvies working on the bridge
would come to the village; they begged for alms, laughed at the women,
and sometimes carried off something. But that was rare; as a rule the
days passed quietly and peacefully as though no bridge-building were
going on, and only in the evening, when camp fires gleamed near the
bridge, the wind faintly wafted the songs of the navvies. And by day
there was sometimes the mournful clang of metal, don-don-don.

It happened that the engineer's wife came to see him. She was pleased
with the river-banks and the gorg