open before us,
but the sun had already set and the smoke lay in black clouds over the
green, velvety young corn. It was melancholy in the spring air, and in
the darkening sky, and in the railway carriage.

The familiar figure of the guard came into the carriage, and he began
lighting the candles.

THE SHOEMAKER AND THE DEVIL

IT was Christmas Eve. Marya had long been snoring on the stove; all the
paraffin in the little lamp had burnt out, but Fyodor Nilov still sat at
work. He would long ago have flung aside his work and gone out into the
street, but a customer from Kolokolny Lane, who had a fortnight before
ordered some boots, had been in the previous day, had abused him
roundly, and had ordered him to finish the boots at once before the
morning service.

"It's a convict's life!" Fyodor grumbled as he worked. "Some people have
been asleep long ago, others are enjoying themselves, while you sit here
like some Cain and sew for the devil knows whom...."

To save himself from accidentally falling asleep, he kept taking a
bottle from under the table and drinking out of it, and after every pull
at it he twisted his head and said aloud:

"What is the reason, kindly tell me, that customers enjoy themselves
while I am forced to sit and work for them? Because they have money and
I am a beggar?"

He hated all his customers, especially the one who lived in Kolokolny
Lane. He was a gentleman of gloomy appearance, with long hair, a yellow
face, blue spectacles, and a husky voice. He had a German name which one
could not pronounce. It was impossible to tell what was his calling
and what he did. When, a fortnight before, Fyodor had gone to take his
measure, he, the customer, was sitting on the floor pounding something
in a mortar. Before Fyodor had time to say good-morning the contents of
the mortar suddenly flared up and burned with a bright red flame; there
was a stink of sulphur and burnt feathers, and the room was filled
with a thick pink smoke, so that Fyodor sneezed five times; and as he
returned home afterwards, he thought: "Anyone who feared God would not
have anything to do with things like that."

When there was nothing left in the bottle Fyodor put the boots on the
table and sank into thought. He leaned his heavy head on his fist and
began thinking of his poverty, of his hard life with no glimmer of
light in it. Then he thought of the rich, of their big houses and their
carriages, of their hundred-rouble n