It was a very old manor house, deserted long ago.  The wall round it, of porous white stone, was mouldering and had fallen away in places, and the lodge, the blank wall of which looked out on the open country, had a rusty roof with patches of tin-plate gleaming here and there on it.  Within the gates could be seen a spacious courtyard overgrown with rough weeds, and an old manor house with sunblinds on the windows, and a high roof red with rust.  Two lodges, exactly alike, stood one on each side of the house to right and to left:  one had its windows nailed up with boards; near the other, of which the windows were open, there was washing on the line, and there were calves moving about.  The last of the telegraph poles stood in the courtyard, and the wire from it ran to the window of the lodge, of which the blank wall looked out into the open country.  The door stood open; I went in.  By the telegraph apparatus a gentleman with a curly dark head, wearing a reefer coat made of sailcloth, was sitting at a table; he glanced at me morosely from under his brows, but immediately smiled and said: 

“Hullo, Better-than-nothing!”

It was Ivan Tcheprakov, an old schoolfellow of mine, who had been expelled from the second class for smoking.  We used at one time, during autumn, to catch goldfinches, finches, and linnets together, and to sell them in the market early in the morning, while our parents were still in their beds.  We watched for flocks of migrating starlings and shot at them with small shot, then we picked up those that were wounded, and some of them died in our hands in terrible agonies (I remember to this day how they moaned in the cage at night); those that recovered we sold, and swore with the utmost effrontery that they were all cocks.  On one occasion at the market I had only one starling left, which I had offered to purchasers in vain, till at last I sold it for a farthing.  “Anyway, it’s better than nothing,” I said to comfort myself, as I put the farthing in my pocket, and from that day the street urchins and the schoolboys called after me:  “Better-than-nothing”; and to this day the street boys and the shopkeepers mock at me with the nickname, though no one remembers how it arose.

Tcheprakov was not of robust constitution:  he was narrow-chested, round-shouldered, and long-legged.  He wore a silk cord for a tie, had no trace of a waistcoat, and his boots were worse than mine, with the heels trodden down on one side.  He stared, hardly even blinking, with a strained expression, as though he were just going to catch something, and he was always in a fuss.

“You wait a minute,” he would say fussily.  “You listen. . . .  Whatever was I talking about?”

We got into conversation.  I learned that the estate on which I now was had until recently been the property of the Tcheprakovs, and had only the autumn before passed into the possession of Dolzhikov, who considered it more profitable to put his money into land than to keep it in notes, and had already bought up three good-sized mortgaged estates in our neighbourhood.  At the sale Tcheprakov’s mother had reserved for herself the right to live for the next two years in one of the lodges at the side, and had obtained a post for her son in the office.