“Look, Merik,” Lyubka said to him; “get me such horses and I will drive to heaven.”

“Sinners can’t drive to heaven,” said Kalashnikov.  “That’s for holiness.”

Then Lyubka laid the table and brought in a big piece of fat bacon, salted cucumbers, a wooden platter of boiled meat cut up into little pieces, then a frying-pan, in which there were sausages and cabbage spluttering.  A cut-glass decanter of vodka, which diffused a smell of orange-peel all over the room when it was poured out, was put on the table also.

Yergunov was annoyed that Kalashnikov and the dark fellow Merik talked together and took no notice of him at all, behaving exactly as though he were not in the room.  And he wanted to talk to them, to brag, to drink, to have a good meal, and if possible to have a little fun with Lyubka, who sat down near him half a dozen times while they were at supper, and, as though by accident, brushed against him with her handsome shoulders and passed her hands over her broad hips.  She was a healthy, active girl, always laughing and never still:  she would sit down, then get up, and when she was sitting down she would keep turning first her face and then her back to her neighbour, like a fidgety child, and never failed to brush against him with her elbows or her knees.

And he was displeased, too, that the peasants drank only a glass each and no more, and it was awkward for him to drink alone.  But he could not refrain from taking a second glass, all the same, then a third, and he ate all the sausage.  He brought himself to flatter the peasants, that they might accept him as one of the party instead of holding him at arm’s length.

“You are a fine set of fellows in Bogalyovka!” he said, and wagged his head.

“In what way fine fellows?” enquired Kalashnikov.

“Why, about horses, for instance.  Fine fellows at stealing!”

“H’m! fine fellows, you call them.  Nothing but thieves and drunkards.”

“They have had their day, but it is over,” said Merik, after a pause.  “But now they have only Filya left, and he is blind.”

“Yes, there is no one but Filya,” said Kalashnikov, with a sigh.  “Reckon it up, he must be seventy; the German settlers knocked out one of his eyes, and he does not see well with the other.  It is cataract.  In old days the police officer would shout as soon as he saw him:  ‘Hey, you Shamil!’ and all the peasants called him that —­he was Shamil all over the place; and now his only name is One-eyed Filya.  But he was a fine fellow!  Lyuba’s father, Andrey Grigoritch, and he stole one night into Rozhnovo—­there were cavalry regiments stationed there—­and carried off nine of the soldiers’ horses, the very best of them.  They weren’t frightened of the sentry, and in the morning they sold all the horses for twenty roubles to the gypsy Afonka.  Yes!  But nowadays a man contrives to carry off a horse whose rider is drunk or asleep, and has no fear of God, but will take the very boots from a drunkard, and then slinks off and goes away a hundred and fifty miles with a horse, and haggles at the market, haggles like a Jew, till the policeman catches him, the fool.  There is no fun in it; it is simply a disgrace!  A paltry set of people, I must say.”