Dubetchnya, as our first station was called, was a little under twelve miles from the town.  I walked.  The cornfields, bathed in the morning sunshine, were bright green.  It was a flat, cheerful country, and in the distance there were the distinct outlines of the station, of ancient barrows, and far-away homesteads. . . .  How nice it was out there in the open!  And how I longed to be filled with the sense of freedom, if only for that one morning, that I might not think of what was being done in the town, not think of my needs, not feel hungry!  Nothing has so marred my existence as an acute feeling of hunger, which made images of buckwheat porridge, rissoles, and baked fish mingle strangely with my best thoughts.  Here I was standing alone in the open country, gazing upward at a lark which hovered in the air at the same spot, trilling as though in hysterics, and meanwhile I was thinking:  “How nice it would be to eat a piece of bread and butter!”

Or I would sit down by the roadside to rest, and shut my eyes to listen to the delicious sounds of May, and what haunted me was the smell of hot potatoes.  Though I was tall and strongly built, I had as a rule little to eat, and so the predominant sensation throughout the day was hunger, and perhaps that was why I knew so well how it is that such multitudes of people toil merely for their daily bread, and can talk of nothing but things to eat.

At Dubetchnya they were plastering the inside of the station, and building a wooden upper storey to the pumping shed.  It was hot; there was a smell of lime, and the workmen sauntered listlessly between the heaps of shavings and mortar rubble.  The pointsman lay asleep near his sentry box, and the sun was blazing full on his face.  There was not a single tree.  The telegraph wire hummed faintly and hawks were perching on it here and there.  I, wandering, too, among the heaps of rubbish, and not knowing what to do, recalled how the engineer, in answer to my question what my duties would consist in, had said:  “We shall see when you are there”; but what could one see in that wilderness?

The plasterers spoke of the foreman, and of a certain Fyodot Vasilyev.  I did not understand, and gradually I was overcome by depression —­the physical depression in which one is conscious of one’s arms and legs and huge body, and does not know what to do with them or where to put them.

After I had been walking about for at least a couple of hours, I noticed that there were telegraph poles running off to the right from the station, and that they ended a mile or a mile and a half away at a white stone wall.  The workmen told me the office was there, and at last I reflected that that was where I ought to go.