rious,
feeling that Dubechnia was no longer ours, and Masha used to go pale and
say:

"Have we to live another year and a half with these creatures?"

Ivan Cheprakov, the son, was a guard on the railway. During the winter
he got very thin and weak, so that he got drunk on one glass of vodka,
and felt cold out of the sun. He hated wearing his guard's uniform and
was ashamed of it, but found his job profitable because he could steal
candles and sell them. My new position gave him a mixed feeling of
astonishment, envy, and vague hope that something of the sort might
happen to him. He used to follow Masha with admiring eyes, and to ask me
what I had for dinner nowadays, and his ugly, emaciated face used to
wear a sweet, sad expression, and he used to twitch his fingers as
though he could feel my happiness with them.

"I say, Little Profit," he would say excitedly, lighting and relighting
his cigarette; he always made a mess wherever he stood because he used
to waste a whole box of matches on one cigarette. "I say, my life is
about as beastly as it could be. Every little squirt of a soldier can
shout: 'Here guard! Here!' I have such a lot in the trains and you know,
mine's a rotten life! My mother has ruined me! I heard a doctor say in
the train, if the parents are loose, their children become drunkards or
criminals. That's it."

Once he came staggering into the yard. His eyes wandered aimlessly and
he breathed heavily; he laughed and cried, and said something in a kind
of frenzy, and through his thickly uttered words I could only hear: "My
mother? Where is my mother?" and he wailed like a child crying, because
it has lost its mother in a crowd. I led him away into the garden and
laid him down under a tree, and all that day and through the night Masha
and I took it in turns to stay with him. He was sick and Masha looked
with disgust at his pale, wet face and said:

"Are we to have these creatures on the place for another year and a
half? It is awful! Awful!"

And what a lot of trouble the peasants gave us! How many disappointments
we had at the outset, in the spring, when we so longed to be happy! My
wife built a school. I designed the school for sixty boys, and the
Zemstvo Council approved the design, but recommended our building the
school at Kurilovka, the big village, only three miles away; besides the
Kurilovka school, where the children of four villages, including that of
Dubechnia, were taught, was old and inad