At last the bullocks are sold to a dealer.  Malahin hires drovers.  The cattle are divided into herds, ten in each, and driven to the other end of the town.  The bullocks, exhausted, go with drooping heads through the noisy streets, and look indifferently at what they see for the first and last time in their lives.  The tattered drovers walk after them, their heads drooping too.  They are bored....  Now and then some drover starts out of his brooding, remembers that there are cattle in front of him intrusted to his charge, and to show that he is doing his duty brings a stick down full swing on a bullock’s back.  The bullock staggers with the pain, runs forward a dozen paces, and looks about him as though he were ashamed at being beaten before people.

After selling the bullocks and buying for his family presents such as they could perfectly well have bought at home, Malahin and Yasha get ready for their journey back.  Three hours before the train goes the old man, who has already had a drop too much with the purchaser and so is fussy, goes down with Yasha to the restaurant and sits down to drink tea.  Like all provincials, he cannot eat and drink alone:  he must have company as fussy and as fond of sedate conversation as himself.

“Call the host!” he says to the waiter; “tell him I should like to entertain him.”

The hotel-keeper, a well-fed man, absolutely indifferent to his lodgers, comes and sits down to the table.

“Well, we have sold our stock,” Malahin says, laughing.  “I have swapped my goat for a hawk.  Why, when we set off the price of meat was three roubles ninety kopecks, but when we arrived it had dropped to three roubles twenty-five.  They tell us we are too late, we should have been here three days earlier, for now there is not the same demand for meat, St. Philip’s fast has come....  Eh?  It’s a nice how-do-you-do!  It meant a loss of fourteen roubles on each bullock.  Yes.  But only think what it costs to bring the stock!  Fifteen roubles carriage, and you must put down six roubles for each bullock, tips, bribes, drinks, and one thing and another....”

The hotel-keeper listens out of politeness and reluctantly drinks tea.  Malahin sighs and groans, gesticulates, jests about his ill-luck, but everything shows that the loss he has sustained does not trouble him much.  He doesn’t mind whether he has lost or gained as long as he has listeners, has something to make a fuss about, and is not late for his train.

An hour later Malahin and Yasha, laden with bags and boxes, go downstairs from the hotel room to the front door to get into a sledge and drive to the station.  They are seen off by the hotel-keeper, the waiter, and various women.  The old man is touched.  He thrusts ten-kopeck pieces in all directions, and says in a sing-song voice: 

“Good by, good health to you!  God grant that all may be well with you.  Please God if we are alive and well we shall come again in Lent.  Good-by.  Thank you.  God bless you!”