The boy explained the reason to her in a whisper:  “He has a light hand.”

“Very like,” said she, looking at me with new interest.

“What do you mean?” I asked the boy.

“Why, don’t you know?” said he wonderingly.  “Wherever you go you bring good fortune.  After I met you on the road I immediately began to find wood much more plentifully.  When I came in I learned how to buy pictures.  Then mother said she would let me go with you to see the castle.  Then, not only are you a good customer staying the night, but after you came all this crowd of customers.  Generally we have nobody at all....”

“And I met this wonderful boy,” thought I.  “I should like to carry him away.  He is like something in myself.  He also had the light hand, but what a testimony he gave the tramp!  Wherever he goes he brings happiness.”

As once I wrote before, “tramps often bring blessings to men:  they have given up the causes of quarrels.  Sometimes they are a little divine.  God’s grace comes down upon them.”

VI

ST. SPIRIDON OF TREMIFOND

The charge for driving on Caucasian roads is a penny per horse per mile, so if you ride ten miles and have two horses you pay the driver one shilling and eightpence.  But if, as generally happens, the driver’s sense of cash has deprived him of a sense of humour, a conversation of this kind commonly arises.

“One and eightpence.  What’s this?”

“Ten miles, and two horses at a penny per horse per mile; isn’t that correct?”

“To the devil with your one and eightpence.  Give it to the horses; a penny a mile for a horse, and how about the man, the cart, the harness?  I gave you hay to sit on.  See what fine weather it has been!  What beautiful scenery!  Yonder is the church ... the wineshop, the....”

“Hold hard, my good man.  The Universe, our salvation by Christ, why don’t you charge for these as well!  Here’s sixpence to buy yourself a drink.”

The driver takes the sixpence and looks at it, makes a calculation, and then blurts out: 

“What!  Sixpence for a man and tenpence for a horse; ai, ai, what a barin I have found.  Sixpence for a man and tenpence for a horse.  Bad news, bad news!  Cursed be the day....”

Here you give him another sixpence, and get out of earshot quickly.

A penny a mile a horse.  It is good pay in the Caucasus, and I for my part charge myself only a halfpenny a mile.  If I walk twenty-five miles, then I allow myself a shilling wages, and, of course, some of that I save for the occasion when I come into a town with a great desire for good things.  Then a spending of savings and a feast!

“Good machines use little fuel,” said an emaciated tramp to me one day.  But I have no ambition to be accounted a good machine on those terms.  I eat and drink anything that comes in my way, and am ready at any moment to feast or to fast.  I seldom pass a crab-apple tree without tasting its fruit, or allow myself to pass a mountain stream without drinking.