The native looks indifferently at Lyashkevsky, tries to say something but cannot; sloth and the sultry heat have paralysed his conversational faculties. . . .  Yawning lazily, he makes the sign of the cross over his mouth, and turns his eyes up towards the sky where pigeons fly, bathing in the hot air.

“You must not be too severe in your judgments, honoured friend,” sighs Finks, mopping his big bald head with his handkerchief.  “Put yourself in their place:  business is slack now, there’s unemployment all round, a bad harvest, stagnation in trade.”

“Good gracious, how you talk!” cries Lyashkevsky in indignation, angrily wrapping his dressing gown round him.  “Supposing he has no job and no trade, why doesn’t he work in his own home, the devil flay him!  I say!  Is there no work for you at home?  Just look, you brute!  Your steps have come to pieces, the plankway is falling into the ditch, the fence is rotten; you had better set to and mend it all, or if you don’t know how, go into the kitchen and help your wife.  Your wife is running out every minute to fetch water or carry out the slops.  Why shouldn’t you run instead, you rascal?  And then you must remember, Franz Stepanitch, that he has six acres of garden, that he has pigsties and poultry houses, but it is all wasted and no use.  The flower garden is overgrown with weeds and almost baked dry, while the boys play ball in the kitchen garden.  Isn’t he a lazy brute?  I assure you, though I have only the use of an acre and a half with my lodgings, you will always find radishes, and salad, and fennel, and onions, while that blackguard buys everything at the market.”

“He is a Russian, there is no doing anything with him,” said Finks with a condescending smile; “it’s in the Russian blood. . . .  They are a very lazy people!  If all property were given to Germans or Poles, in a year’s time you would not recognise the town.”

The native in the blue trousers beckons a girl with a sieve, buys a kopeck’s worth of sunflower seeds from her and begins cracking them.

“A race of curs!” says Lyashkevsky angrily.  “That’s their only occupation, they crack sunflower seeds and they talk politics!  The devil take them!”

Staring wrathfully at the blue trousers, Lyashkevsky is gradually roused to fury, and gets so excited that he actually foams at the mouth.  He speaks with a Polish accent, rapping out each syllable venomously, till at last the little bags under his eyes swell, and he abandons the Russian “scoundrels, blackguards, and rascals,” and rolling his eyes, begins pouring out a shower of Polish oaths, coughing from his efforts.  “Lazy dogs, race of curs.  May the devil take them!”

The native hears this abuse distinctly, but, judging from the appearance of his crumpled little figure, it does not affect him.  Apparently he has long ago grown as used to it as to the buzzing of the flies, and feels it superfluous to protest.  At every visit Finks has to listen to a tirade on the subject of the lazy good-for-nothing aborigines, and every time exactly the same one.