earth would get dry and at last it would be possible to “do business” in the villages. Often Hopeful, who suffered from insomnia, would wake his friend in the early morning, and would announce joyfully:

“Hey! Get up! The rooks have come!”

“They have?”

“Honest. You hear them cawing?”

Leaving their shanty, they would watch eagerly for a long time how the black messengers of spring were weaving new nests and repairing old ones, filling the air with their loud, anxious chatter.

“Now it’s the larks’ turn,” Hopeful would say, and set about mending his old, half-rotten bird-net.

The larks would come. The comrades would go into the fields, set up the net on a brown patch, and racing through the wet, muddy field, would drive into the net the hungry birds, exhausted by their long flight and looking for food on the moist earth that had just been released from the snow. Having caught the birds, they would sell them for five and ten kopecks apiece. Then nettles appeared. They picked them and took them to the marketplace to sell them to the women who traded in greens. Almost every spring day brought them something new, some additional, if small, earnings. They knew how to take advantage of everything: pussy-willows, sorrel, mushrooms, strawberries—nothing escaped them. The soldiers would come out for rifle practice. When the shooting was over the friends would dig in the earthworks looking for bullets, which they would afterwards sell at twelve kopecks a pound. All these odd jobs, although they prevented the friends from dying of hunger, very rarely gave them a chance to relish the sense of having eaten their fill, the pleasant feeling of a full stomach busily digesting the food it held.

One day in April, when the trees were only beginning to bud, when the woods were enveloped in a bluish haze, and on the brown, rich, sun-flooded fields the grass was just starting to show, the friends were walking on the high-road, smoking cheap cigarettes that they themselves had rolled, and engaged in talk.

“Your cough is getting harder,” Jig-Leg calmly warned his comrade.

“I don’t give a damn! The sun will warm me, and I’ll be myself again.”

“H’m! Maybe you ought to go to the hospital.”

“Nonsense! What do I need a hospital for? If I have to die, I’ll die anyway!”

“True enough.”

They were walking along through a birch grove, and the trees cast upon them the patterned shadows of their delicate branches. Sparrows hopped on the road, chirping gaily.

“You don’t walk as well as you used to,” observed Jig-Leg, after a pause.

“It’s because I have a choky feeling,” explained Hopeful. “These days the air is thick and rich, and it’s hard for me to swallow it.”

And, stopping short, he had a coughing-fit.

Jig-Leg stood by, smoked away, and looked at him uncertainly. Hopeful shook with coughing and rubbed his chest with his hands. His face turned blue.

“It clears my lungs, anyway!” he said, when he had stopped coughing.