d did not know
what to do with them or where to go.

After walking for at least a couple of hours I noticed that from the
station to the right of the line there were telegraph-poles which after
about one and a half or two miles ended in a white stone wall. The
labourers said it was the office, and I decided at last that I must go
there.

It was a very old farmhouse, long unused. The wall of rough, white stone
was decayed, and in places had crumbled away, and the roof of the wing,
the blind wall of which looked toward the railway, had perished, and
was patched here and there with tin. Through the gates there was a large
yard, overgrown with tall grass, and beyond that, an old house with
Venetian blinds in the windows, and a high roof, brown with rot. On
either side of the house, to right and left, were two symmetrical wings;
the windows of one were boarded up, while by the other, the windows of
which were open, there were a number of calves grazing. The last
telegraph-pole stood in the yard, and the wire went from it to the wing
with the blind wall. The door was open and I went in. By the table at
the telegraph was sitting a man with a dark, curly head in a canvas
coat; he glared at me sternly and askance, but he immediately smiled and
said:

"How do you do, Profit?"

It was Ivan Cheprakov, my school friend, who was expelled, when he was
in the second class, for smoking. Once, during the autumn, we were out
catching goldfinches, starlings, and hawfinches, to sell them in the
market early in the morning when our parents were still asleep.

We beat up flocks of starlings and shot at them with pellets, and then
picked up the wounded, and some died in terrible agony--I can still
remember how they moaned at night in my case--and some recovered. And we
sold them, and swore black and blue that they were male birds. Once in
the market I had only one starling left, which I hawked about and
finally sold for a copeck. "A little profit!" I said to console myself,
and from that time at school I was always known as "Little Profit," and
even now, schoolboys and the townspeople sometimes use the name to tease
me, though no one but myself remembers how it came about.

Cheprakov never was strong. He was narrow-chested, round-shouldered,
long-legged. His tie looked like a piece of string, he had no waistcoat,
and his boots were worse than mine--with the heels worn down. He blinked
with his eyes and had an eager expression as though