Pavel Vassilitch is scared too.

“Yes, yes, my boy,” he says.  “For seven weeks mother will give you nothing but Lenten food.  You can’t miss the last supper before the fast.”

“Oh dear, I am sleepy,” says Styopa peevishly.

“Since that is how it is, lay the supper quickly,” Pavel Vassilitch cries in a fluster.  “Anna, why are you sitting there, silly?  Make haste and lay the table.”

Pelageya Ivanovna clasps her hands and runs into the kitchen with an expression as though the house were on fire.

“Make haste, make haste,” is heard all over the house.  “Styopotchka is sleepy.  Anna!  Oh dear me, what is one to do?  Make haste.”

Five minutes later the table is laid.  Again the cats, arching their spines, and stretching themselves with their tails in the air, come into the dining-room. . . .  The family begin supper. . . .  No one is hungry, everyone’s stomach is overfull, but yet they must eat.

THE OLD HOUSE

(A Story told by a Houseowner)

The old house had to be pulled down that a new one might be built in its place.  I led the architect through the empty rooms, and between our business talk told him various stories.  The tattered wallpapers, the dingy windows, the dark stoves, all bore the traces of recent habitation and evoked memories.  On that staircase, for instance, drunken men were once carrying down a dead body when they stumbled and flew headlong downstairs together with the coffin; the living were badly bruised, while the dead man looked very serious, as though nothing had happened, and shook his head when they lifted him up from the ground and put him back in the coffin.  You see those three doors in a row:  in there lived young ladies who were always receiving visitors, and so were better dressed than any other lodgers, and could pay their rent regularly.  The door at the end of the corridor leads to the wash-house, where by day they washed clothes and at night made an uproar and drank beer.  And in that flat of three rooms everything is saturated with bacteria and bacilli.  It’s not nice there.  Many lodgers have died there, and I can positively assert that that flat was at some time cursed by someone, and that together with its human lodgers there was always another lodger, unseen, living in it.  I remember particularly the fate of one family.  Picture to yourself an ordinary man, not remarkable in any way, with a wife, a mother, and four children.  His name was Putohin; he was a copying clerk at a notary’s, and received thirty-five roubles a month.  He was a sober, religious, serious man.  When he brought me his rent for the flat he always apologised for being badly dressed; apologised for being five days late, and when I gave him a receipt he would smile good-humouredly and say:  “Oh yes, there’s that too, I don’t like those receipts.”  He lived poorly but decently.  In that middle room,