“Nowadays, you know,” he began, “all sorts of telegraphs, telephones, and marvels of all kinds, in fact, have come in, but people are no better than they were.  They say that in our day, thirty or forty years ago, men were coarse and cruel; but isn’t it just the same now?  We certainly did not stand on ceremony in our day.  I remember in the Caucasus when we were stationed by a little river with nothing to do for four whole months—­I was an under-officer at that time —­something queer happened, quite in the style of a novel.  Just on the banks of that river, you know, where our division was encamped, a wretched prince whom we had killed not long before was buried.  And at night, you know, the princess used to come to his grave and weep.  She would wail and wail, and moan and moan, and make us so depressed we couldn’t sleep, and that’s the fact.  We couldn’t sleep one night, we couldn’t sleep a second; well, we got sick of it.  And from a common-sense point of view you really can’t go without your sleep for the devil knows what (excuse the expression).  We took that princess and gave her a good thrashing, and she gave up coming.  There’s an instance for you.  Nowadays, of course, there is not the same class of people, and they are not given to thrashing and they live in cleaner style, and there is more learning, but, you know, the soul is just the same:  there is no change.  Now, look here, there’s a landowner living here among us; he has mines, you know; all sorts of tramps without passports who don’t know where to go work for him.  On Saturdays he has to settle up with the workmen, but he doesn’t care to pay them, you know, he grudges the money.  So he’s got hold of a foreman who is a tramp too, though he does wear a hat.  ‘Don’t you pay them anything,’ he says, ’not a kopeck; they’ll beat you, and let them beat you,’ says he, ’but you put up with it, and I’ll pay you ten roubles every Saturday for it.’  So on the Saturday evening the workmen come to settle up in the usual way; the foreman says to them:  ‘Nothing!’ Well, word for word, as the master said, they begin swearing and using their fists. . . .  They beat him and they kick him . . . you know, they are a set of men brutalized by hunger—­they beat him till he is senseless, and then they go each on his way.  The master gives orders for cold water to be poured on the foreman, then flings ten roubles in his face.  And he takes it and is pleased too, for indeed he’d be ready to be hanged for three roubles, let alone ten.  Yes . . . and on Monday a new gang of workmen arrive; they work, for they have nowhere to go . . . .  On Saturday it is the same story over again.”

The visitor turned over on the other side with his face to the back of the sofa and muttered something.