is peasant fare," sighed Kiruha.

"Peasant fare is welcome, too, when one is hungry."

They gave Yegorushka a spoon. He began eating, not sitting, but
standing close to the cauldron and looking down into it as in a
hole. The grain smelt of fish and fish-scales were mixed up with
the millet. The crayfish could not be hooked out with a spoon, and
the men simply picked them out of the cauldron with their hands;
Vassya did so particularly freely, and wetted his sleeves as well
as his hands in the mess. But yet the stew seemed to Yegorushka
very nice, and reminded him of the crayfish soup which his mother
used to make at home on fast-days. Panteley was sitting apart
munching bread.

"Grandfather, why aren't you eating?" Emelyan asked him.

"I don't eat crayfish. . . . Nasty things," the old man said, and
turned away with disgust.

While they were eating they all talked. From this conversation
Yegorushka gathered that all his new acquaintances, in spite of the
differences of their ages and their characters, had one point in
common which made them all alike: they were all people with a
splendid past and a very poor present. Of their past they all--
every one of them--spoke with enthusiasm; their attitude to the
present was almost one of contempt. The Russian loves recalling
life, but he does not love living. Yegorushka did not yet know that,
and before the stew had been all eaten he firmly believed that the
men sitting round the cauldron were the injured victims of fate.
Panteley told them that in the past, before there were railways,
he used to go with trains of waggons to Moscow and to Nizhni, and
used to earn so much that he did not know what to do with his money;
and what merchants there used to be in those days! what fish! how
cheap everything was! Now the roads were shorter, the merchants
were stingier, the peasants were poorer, the bread was dearer,
everything had shrunk and was on a smaller scale. Emelyan told them
that in old days he had been in the choir in the Lugansky works,
and that he had a remarkable voice and read music splendidly, while
now he had become a peasant and lived on the charity of his brother,
who sent him out with his horses and took half his earnings. Vassya
had once worked in a match factory; Kiruha had been a coachman in
a good family, and had been reckoned the smartest driver of a
three-in-hand in the whole district. Dymov, the son of a well-to-do
peasant, lived at ease, enjoyed himself