mercy upon us," he muttered,
sighing heavily. "Are you asleep?" he asked.

"No."

Zhmuhin got out of bed and stopped in the doorway with nothing but
his shirt on, displaying to his guest his sinewy legs, that looked
as dry as sticks.

"Nowadays, you know," he began, "all sorts of telegraphs, telephones,
and marvels of all kinds, in fact, have come in, but people are no
better than they were. They say that in our day, thirty or forty
years ago, men were coarse and cruel; but isn't it just the same
now? We certainly did not stand on ceremony in our day. I remember
in the Caucasus when we were stationed by a little river with nothing
to do for four whole months--I was an under-officer at that time
--something queer happened, quite in the style of a novel. Just
on the banks of that river, you know, where our division was encamped,
a wretched prince whom we had killed not long before was buried.
And at night, you know, the princess used to come to his grave and
weep. She would wail and wail, and moan and moan, and make us so
depressed we couldn't sleep, and that's the fact. We couldn't sleep
one night, we couldn't sleep a second; well, we got sick of it. And
from a common-sense point of view you really can't go without your
sleep for the devil knows what (excuse the expression). We took
that princess and gave her a good thrashing, and she gave up coming.
There's an instance for you. Nowadays, of course, there is not the
same class of people, and they are not given to thrashing and they
live in cleaner style, and there is more learning, but, you know,
the soul is just the same: there is no change. Now, look here,
there's a landowner living here among us; he has mines, you know;
all sorts of tramps without passports who don't know where to go
work for him. On Saturdays he has to settle up with the workmen,
but he doesn't care to pay them, you know, he grudges the money.
So he's got hold of a foreman who is a tramp too, though he does
wear a hat. 'Don't you pay them anything,' he says, 'not a kopeck;
they'll beat you, and let them beat you,' says he, 'but you put up
with it, and I'll pay you ten roubles every Saturday for it.' So
on the Saturday evening the workmen come to settle up in the usual
way; the foreman says to them: 'Nothing!' Well, word for word, as
the master said, they begin swearing and using their fists. . . .
They beat him and they kick him . . . you know, they are a set of
men brutalized by hunger--they b