Madame Tcheprakov’s son, Ivan, was serving as a guard on our railway-line.  He had grown much thinner and feebler during the winter, so that a single glass was enough to make him drunk, and he shivered out of the sunshine.  He wore the guard’s uniform with aversion and was ashamed of it, but considered his post a good one, as he could steal the candles and sell them.  My new position excited in him a mixed feeling of wonder, envy, and a vague hope that something of the same sort might happen to him.  He used to watch Masha with ecstatic eyes, ask me what I had for dinner now, and his lean and ugly face wore a sad and sweetish expression, and he moved his fingers as though he were feeling my happiness with them.

“Listen, Better-than-nothing,” he said fussily, relighting his cigarette at every instant; there was always a litter where he stood, for he wasted dozens of matches, lighting one cigarette.  “Listen, my life now is the nastiest possible.  The worst of it is any subaltern can shout:  ‘Hi, there, guard!’ I have overheard all sorts of things in the train, my boy, and do you know, I have learned that life’s a beastly thing!  My mother has been the ruin of me!  A doctor in the train told me that if parents are immoral, their children are drunkards or criminals.  Think of that!”

Once he came into the yard, staggering; his eyes gazed about blankly, his breathing was laboured; he laughed and cried and babbled as though in a high fever, and the only words I could catch in his muddled talk were, “My mother!  Where’s my mother?” which he uttered with a wail like a child who has lost his mother in a crowd.  I led him into our garden and laid him down under a tree, and Masha and I took turns to sit by him all that day and all night.  He was very sick, and Masha looked with aversion at his pale, wet face, and said: 

“Is it possible these reptiles will go on living another year and a half in our yard?  It’s awful! it’s awful!”

And how many mortifications the peasants caused us!  How many bitter disappointments in those early days in the spring months, when we so longed to be happy.  My wife built a school.  I drew a plan of a school for sixty boys, and the Zemstvo Board approved of it, but advised us to build the school at Kurilovka the big village which was only two miles from us.  Moreover, the school at Kurilovka in which children—­from four villages, our Dubetchnya being one of the number—­were taught, was old and too small, and the floor was scarcely safe to walk upon.  At the end of March at Masha’s wish, she was appointed guardian of the Kurilovka school, and at the beginning of April we three times summoned the village assembly, and tried to persuade the peasants that their school was old and overcrowded, and that it was essential to build a new one.  A member of the Zemstvo Board and the Inspector of Peasant Schools came, and they, too, tried to persuade them.  After each meeting the peasants surrounded