up long ago. Nine-tenths of them are
swindlers, the scoundrels! To borrow money and not return it is
their rule. Thanks to them the town bank is going smash!"

"I was at Yegorov's yesterday," Finks interrupts the Pole, anxious
to change the conversation, "and only fancy, I won six roubles and
a half from him at picquet."

"I believe I still owe you something at picquet," Lyashkevsky
recollects, "I ought to win it back. Wouldn't you like one game?"

"Perhaps just one," Finks assents. "I must make haste to the high
school, you know."

Lyashkevsky and Finks sit down at the open window and begin a game
of picquet. The native in the blue trousers stretches with relish,
and husks of sunflower seeds fall in showers from all over him on
to the ground. At that moment from the gate opposite appears another
native with a long beard, wearing a crumpled yellowish-grey cotton
coat. He screws up his eyes affectionately at the blue trousers and
shouts:

"Good-morning, Semyon Nikolaitch, I have the honour to congratulate
you on the Thursday."

"And the same to you, Kapiton Petrovitch!"

"Come to my seat! It's cool here!"

The blue trousers, with much sighing and groaning and waddling from
side to side like a duck, cross the street.

"Tierce major . . ." mutters Lyashkevsky, "from the queen. . . .
Five and fifteen. . . . The rascals are talking of politics. . . .
Do you hear? They have begun about England. I have six hearts."

"I have the seven spades. My point."

"Yes, it's yours. Do you hear? They are abusing Beaconsfield. They
don't know, the swine, that Beaconsfield has been dead for ever so
long. So I have twenty-nine. . . . Your lead."

"Eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . . Yes, amazing people, these
Russians! Eleven . . . twelve. . . . The Russian inertia is unique
on the terrestrial globe."

"Thirty . . . Thirty-one. . . . One ought to take a good whip, you
know. Go out and give them Beaconsfield. I say, how their tongues
are wagging! It's easier to babble than to work. I suppose you threw
away the queen of clubs and I didn't realise it."

"Thirteen . . . Fourteen. . . . It's unbearably hot! One must be
made of iron to sit in such heat on a seat in the full sun! Fifteen."

The first game is followed by a second, the second by a third. . . .
Finks loses, and by degrees works himself up into a gambling fever
and forgets all about the cracking walls of the high school cellar.
As Lyashkevsky plays he keeps looking