“In sin my mother bore me!  Ah, sins, sins!  Here now we are walking along the street and looking at the street lamps, but when we die, we shall burn in a fiery Gehenna. . . .”

Or he fell into a good-natured tone, called Kashtanka to him, and said to her:  “You, Kashtanka, are an insect of a creature, and nothing else.  Beside a man, you are much the same as a joiner beside a cabinet-maker. . . .”

While he talked to her in that way, there was suddenly a burst of music.  Kashtanka looked round and saw that a regiment of soldiers was coming straight towards her.  Unable to endure the music, which unhinged her nerves, she turned round and round and wailed.  To her great surprise, the carpenter, instead of being frightened, whining and barking, gave a broad grin, drew himself up to attention, and saluted with all his five fingers.  Seeing that her master did not protest, Kashtanka whined louder than ever, and dashed across the road to the opposite pavement.

When she recovered herself, the band was not playing and the regiment was no longer there.  She ran across the road to the spot where she had left her master, but alas, the carpenter was no longer there.  She dashed forward, then back again and ran across the road once more, but the carpenter seemed to have vanished into the earth.  Kashtanka began sniffing the pavement, hoping to find her master by the scent of his tracks, but some wretch had been that way just before in new rubber goloshes, and now all delicate scents were mixed with an acute stench of india-rubber, so that it was impossible to make out anything.

Kashtanka ran up and down and did not find her master, and meanwhile it had got dark.  The street lamps were lighted on both sides of the road, and lights appeared in the windows.  Big, fluffy snowflakes were falling and painting white the pavement, the horses’ backs and the cabmen’s caps, and the darker the evening grew the whiter were all these objects.  Unknown customers kept walking incessantly to and fro, obstructing her field of vision and shoving against her with their feet. (All mankind Kashtanka divided into two uneven parts:  masters and customers; between them there was an essential difference:  the first had the right to beat her, and the second she had the right to nip by the calves of their legs.) These customers were hurrying off somewhere and paid no attention to her.

When it got quite dark, Kashtanka was overcome by despair and horror.  She huddled up in an entrance and began whining piteously.  The long day’s journeying with Luka Alexandritch had exhausted her, her ears and her paws were freezing, and, what was more, she was terribly hungry.  Only twice in the whole day had she tasted a morsel:  she had eaten a little paste at the bookbinder’s, and in one of the taverns she had found a sausage skin on the floor, near the counter —­that was all.  If she had been a human being she would have certainly thought:  “No, it is impossible to live like this!  I must shoot myself!”