“God knows what to make of you,” Ptaha persisted in addressing the tramp.  “Peasant you are not, and gentleman you are not, but some sort of a thing between....  The other day I was washing a sieve in the pond and caught a reptile—­see, as long as a finger, with gills and a tail.  The first minute I thought it was a fish, then I looked—­and, blow it! if it hadn’t paws.  It was not a fish, it was a viper, and the deuce only knows what it was....  So that’s like you....  What’s your calling?”

“I am a peasant and of peasant family,” sighed the tramp.  “My mamma was a house serf.  I don’t look like a peasant, that’s true, for such has been my lot, good man.  My mamma was a nurse with the gentry, and had every comfort, and as I was of her flesh and blood, I lived with her in the master’s house.  She petted and spoiled me, and did her best to take me out of my humble class and make a gentleman of me.  I slept in a bed, every day I ate a real dinner, I wore breeches and shoes like a gentleman’s child.  What my mamma ate I was fed on, too; they gave her stuffs as a present, and she dressed me up in them....  We lived well!  I ate so many sweets and cakes in my childish years that if they could be sold now it would be enough to buy a good horse.  Mamma taught me to read and write, she instilled the fear of God in me from my earliest years, and she so trained me that now I can’t bring myself to utter an unrefined peasant word.  And I don’t drink vodka, my lad, and am neat in my dress, and know how to behave with decorum in good society.  If she is still living, God give her health; and if she is dead, then, O Lord, give her soul peace in Thy Kingdom, wherein the just are at rest.”

The tramp bared his head with the scanty hair standing up like a brush on it, turned his eyes upward and crossed himself twice.

“Grant her, O Lord, a verdant and peaceful resting-place,” he said in a drawling voice, more like an old woman’s than a man’s.  “Teach Thy servant Xenia Thy justifications, O Lord!  If it had not been for my beloved mamma I should have been a peasant with no sort of understanding!  Now, young man, ask me about anything and I understand it all:  the holy Scriptures and profane writings, and every prayer and catechism.  I live according to the Scriptures....  I don’t injure anyone, I keep my flesh in purity and continence, I observe the fasts, I eat at fitting times.  Another man will take no pleasure in anything but vodka and lewd talk, but when I have time I sit in a corner and read a book.  I read and I weep and weep.”

“What do you weep for?”

“They write so pathetically!  For some books one gives but a five-kopeck piece, and yet one weeps and sighs exceedingly over it.”

“Is your father dead?” asked Ptaha.

“I don’t know, good man.  I don’t know my parent; it is no use concealing it.  I judge that I was mamma’s illegitimate son.  My mamma lived all her life with the gentry, and did not want to marry a simple peasant....”