swore to himself, thinking that, all alone, without Mishka, maybe he’d hardly manage it all. What sort of night would it be? Chelkash looked at the sky, and along the street.

Half-a-dozen paces from him, on the flagged pavement, there sat, leaning against a stone post, a young fellow in a coarse blue linen shirt, and breeches of the same, in plaited bark shoes, and a torn, reddish cap. Near him lay a little bag, and a scythe without a handle, with a wisp of hay twisted round it and carefully tied with string. The youth was broad-shouldered, squarely built, flaxen-headed, with a sunburnt and weather-beaten face, and big blue eyes that stared with confident simplicity at Chelkash.

Chelkash grinned at him, put out his tongue, and making a fearful face, stared at him with bulging eyes.

The young fellow at first blinked in bewilderment, but then, suddenly bursting into a guffaw, shouted through his laughter: “Oh! you funny chap!” and half getting up from the ground, rolled clumsily from his post to Chelkash’s, dragging his bag in the dust, and knocking the heel of his scythe on the stones.

“Eh, mate, you’ve been on the spree, one can see!” he said to Chelkash, pulling at one leg of his trousers.

“That’s so, suckling, that’s so indeed!” Chelkash admitted frankly; he took at once to this healthy, simple- hearted youth, with his childish clear eyes. “Been off mowing, eh?”

“To be sure! You’ve to mow a verst to earn a groat! It’s a poor business! Folks—crowds of them! Men had come tramping from the famine parts. They’ve knocked down the prices so, it doesn’t pay. Sixty kopecks they paid in Kuban. And in years gone by, they do say, it was three, and four, and five rubles.”

“In years gone by! Why, in years gone by, for the mere sight of a Russian they paid three rubles out that way. Ten years ago I used to make a regular trade of it. One would go to a settlement—‘I’m a Russian,’ one said—and they’d come and gaze at you at once, feel you, wonder at you, and—you’d get three rubles. And they’d give you food and drink—stay as long as you like!”

As the youth listened to Chelkash, at first his mouth dropped open, his round face expressing bewildered rapture; then, grasping the fact that this tattered fellow was romancing, he smacked his lips and guffawed. Chelkash kept a serious face, hiding his smile in his mustache.

“You funny chap, you chaff away as though it were the truth, and I listen and believe you! No, upon my soul, in years gone by—”

“Why, and didn’t I say so? To be sure, I’m telling you how in years gone by—”

“Go on!” the lad waved his hand. “A cobbler, eh? or a tailor? or what are you?”

“I?” Chelkash queried, and after a moment’s thought he said: “I’m a fisherman.”

“A fi-isherman! Really? You catch fish?”

“Why fish? Fishermen about here don’t catch fish only. They fish more for drowned men, old anchors, sunk ships—everything! There are hooks on purpose for all that.”

“Go on! That sort of fishermen, maybe, that sing of themselves:

“Why, have you seen any of that sort?” inquired Chelkash, looking at him with a sneer.

“No, seen them I haven’t! I’ve heard tell.”

“Do you like them?”