Matvey Terehov was a middle-aged man about forty-five, but he had a look of ill-health; his face was wrinkled and his lank, scanty beard was quite grey, and that made him seem many years older.  He spoke in a weak voice, circumspectly, and held his chest when he coughed, while his eyes assumed the uneasy and anxious look one sees in very apprehensive people.  He never said definitely what was wrong with him, but he was fond of describing at length how once at the factory he had lifted a heavy box and had ruptured himself, and how this had led to “the gripes,” and had forced him to give up his work in the tile factory and come back to his native place; but he could not explain what he meant by “the gripes.”

“I must own I am not fond of my cousin,” he went on, pouring himself out some tea.  “He is my elder; it is a sin to censure him, and I fear the Lord, but I cannot bear it in patience.  He is a haughty, surly, abusive man; he is the torment of his relations and workmen, and constantly out of humour.  Last Sunday I asked him in an amiable way, ‘Brother, let us go to Pahomovo for the Mass!’ but he said ’I am not going; the priest there is a gambler;’ and he would not come here to-day because, he said, the priest from Vedenyapino smokes and drinks vodka.  He doesn’t like the clergy!  He reads Mass himself and the Hours and the Vespers, while his sister acts as sacristan; he says, ‘Let us pray unto the Lord’! and she, in a thin little voice like a turkey-hen, ‘Lord, have mercy upon us! . . .’  It’s a sin, that’s what it is.  Every day I say to him, ’Think what you are doing, brother!  Repent, brother!’ and he takes no notice.”

Sergey Nikanoritch, the waiter, poured out five glasses of tea and carried them on a tray to the waiting-room.  He had scarcely gone in when there was a shout: 

“Is that the way to serve it, pig’s face?  You don’t know how to wait!”

It was the voice of the station-master.  There was a timid mutter, then again a harsh and angry shout: 

“Get along!”

The waiter came back greatly crestfallen.

“There was a time when I gave satisfaction to counts and princes,” he said in a low voice; “but now I don’t know how to serve tea. . . .  He called me names before the priest and the ladies!”

The waiter, Sergey Nikanoritch, had once had money of his own, and had kept a buffet at a first-class station, which was a junction, in the principal town of a province.  There he had worn a swallow-tail coat and a gold chain.  But things had gone ill with him; he had squandered all his own money over expensive fittings and service; he had been robbed by his staff, and getting gradually into difficulties, had moved to another station less bustling.  Here his wife had left him, taking with her all the silver, and he moved to a third station of a still lower class, where no hot dishes were served.  Then to a fourth.  Frequently changing his situation and sinking lower