“What was it?” a pilgrim, who was staying the night at the hut and had been awakened by the noise, asked in a husky voice.

“It’s all right,” answered Ignat.  “Nothing of consequence.  Our Whitebrow has taken to sleeping with the sheep in the warm.  Only he hasn’t the sense to go in at the door, but always tries to wriggle in by the roof.  The other night he tore a hole in the roof and went off on the spree, the rascal, and now he has come back and scratched away the roof again.”

“Stupid dog.”

“Yes, there is a spring snapped in his brain.  I do detest fools,” sighed Ignat, clambering on to the stove.  “Come, man of God, it’s early yet to get up.  Let us sleep full steam! . . .”

In the morning he called Whitebrow, smacked him hard about the ears, and then showing him a stick, kept repeating to him: 

“Go in at the door!  Go in at the door!  Go in at the door!”

KASHTANKA

(A Story)

I

Misbehaviour

A YOUNG dog, a reddish mongrel, between a dachshund and a “yard-dog,” very like a fox in face, was running up and down the pavement looking uneasily from side to side.  From time to time she stopped and, whining and lifting first one chilled paw and then another, tried to make up her mind how it could have happened that she was lost.

She remembered very well how she had passed the day, and how, in the end, she had found herself on this unfamiliar pavement.

The day had begun by her master Luka Alexandritch’s putting on his hat, taking something wooden under his arm wrapped up in a red handkerchief, and calling:  “Kashtanka, come along!”

Hearing her name the mongrel had come out from under the work-table, where she slept on the shavings, stretched herself voluptuously and run after her master.  The people Luka Alexandritch worked for lived a very long way off, so that, before he could get to any one of them, the carpenter had several times to step into a tavern to fortify himself.  Kashtanka remembered that on the way she had behaved extremely improperly.  In her delight that she was being taken for a walk she jumped about, dashed barking after the trains, ran into yards, and chased other dogs.  The carpenter was continually losing sight of her, stopping, and angrily shouting at her.  Once he had even, with an expression of fury in his face, taken her fox-like ear in his fist, smacked her, and said emphatically:  “Pla-a-ague take you, you pest!”

After having left the work where it had been bespoken, Luka Alexandritch went into his sister’s and there had something to eat and drink; from his sister’s he had gone to see a bookbinder he knew; from the bookbinder’s to a tavern, from the tavern to another crony’s, and so on.  In short, by the time Kashtanka found herself on the unfamiliar pavement, it was getting dusk, and the carpenter was as drunk as a cobbler.  He was waving his arms and, breathing heavily, muttered: