The overturned canoe with its battered keel and the miserable old trees rifled by the cold wind—­everything around me was bankrupt, barren, and dead, and the sky flowed with undryable tears...  Everything around was waste and gloomy ... it seemed as if everything were dead, leaving me alone among the living, and for me also a cold death waited.

I was then eighteen years old—­a good time!

I walked and walked along the cold wet sand, making my chattering teeth warble in honour of cold and hunger, when suddenly, as I was carefully searching for something to eat behind one of the empty crates, I perceived behind it, crouching on the ground, a figure in woman’s clothes dank with the rain and clinging fast to her stooping shoulders.  Standing over her, I watched to see what she was doing.  It appeared that she was digging a trench in the sand with her hands—­digging away under one of the crates.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked, crouching down on my heels quite close to her.

She gave a little scream and was quickly on her legs again.  Now that she stood there staring at me, with her wide-open grey eyes full of terror, I perceived that it was a girl of my own age, with a very pleasant face embellished unfortunately by three large blue marks.  This spoilt her, although these blue marks had been distributed with a remarkable sense of proportion, one at a time, and all were of equal size—­two under the eyes, and one a little bigger on the forehead just over the bridge of the nose.  This symmetry was evidently the work of an artist well inured to the business of spoiling the human physiognomy.

The girl looked at me, and the terror in her eyes gradually died out...  She shook the sand from her hands, adjusted her cotton head-gear, cowered down, and said: 

“I suppose you too want something to eat?  Dig away then!  My hands are tired.  Over there”—­she nodded her head in the direction of a booth—­“there is bread for certain ... and sausages too...  That booth is still carrying on business.”

I began to dig.  She, after waiting a little and looking at me, sat down beside me and began to help me.

We worked in silence.  I cannot say now whether I thought at that moment of the criminal code, of morality, of proprietorship, and all the other things about which, in the opinion of many experienced persons, one ought to think every moment of one’s life.  Wishing to keep as close to the truth as possible, I must confess that apparently I was so deeply engaged in digging under the crate that I completely forgot about everything else except this one thing:  What could be inside that crate?

The evening drew on.  The grey, mouldy, cold fog grew thicker and thicker around us.  The waves roared with a hollower sound than before, and the rain pattered down on the boards of that crate more loudly and more frequently.  Somewhere or other the night-watchman began springing his rattle.