He had to cut across the New Kishenevsky Market.  Suddenly the savoury, greasy odour of something roasted compelled him to distend his nostrils.  Lichonin recalled that he had not eaten anything since noon yesterday, and at once felt hunger.  He turned to the right, into the centre of the market.

In the days of his starvings—­and he had had to experience them more than once—­he would come here to the market, and for the pitiful coppers, gotten with difficulty, would buy himself bread and fried sausage.  This was in winter, oftenest of all.  The huckstress, wrapped up in a multiplicity of clothes, usually sat upon a pot of coals for warmth; while before her, on the iron dripping-pan, hissed and crackled the thick, home-made sausage, cut into pieces a quarter of a yard in length, plentifully seasoned with garlic.  A piece of sausage usually cost ten kopecks, the bread two kopecks.

There were very many folk at market to-day.  Even at a distance, edging his way to the familiar, loved stall, Lichonin heard the sounds of music.  Having made his way through the crowd, which in a solid ring surrounded one of the stalls, he saw a naive and endearing sight, which may be seen only in the blessed south of Russia.  Ten or fifteen huckstresses, during ordinary times gossips of evil tongue and addicted to unrestrainable swearing, inexhaustible in its verbal diversity, but now, evidently, flattering and tender cronies, had started celebrating even since last evening; had caroused the whole night through and now had carried their noisy merrymaking out to the market.  The hired musicians—­two fiddles, a first and a second, and a tambourine—­ were strumming a monotonous but a lively, bold, daring and cunning tune.  Some of the wives were clinking glasses and kissing each other, pouring vodka over one another; others poured it out into glasses and over the tables; others still, clapping their palms in time with the music, oh’d, squealed, and danced, squatting in one place.  And in the middle of the ring, upon the cobbles of the pavement, a stout woman of about forty-five, but still handsome, with red, fleshy lips, with humid, intoxicated, seemingly unctuous eyes, merrily sparkling from under the high bows of black, regular, Little Russian eyebrows, was whirling around and stamping out a tattoo on one spot.  All the beauty and all the art of her dance consisted in that she would now bow her little head and look out provokingly from under her eyebrows, then suddenly toss it back and let her eyelashes down and spread her hands out at her sides; and also in that in measure with the dance her enormous breasts swayed and quivered under her red calico waist.  During the dance she was singing, now shuffling her heels, now the toes, of her goat-skin shoes: 

    “The fiddle’s playing on the street,
    You can hear its bass so sweet;
    My mother has me locked up neat,
    My waitin’ dearie I can’t meet.”

That was the very country-wife whom Lichonin knew; the self-same who not only had had him for a client during hard times, but had even extended him credit.  She suddenly recognized Lichonin, darted to him, embraced him, squeezed him to her bosom and kissed him straight on his lips with her moist, warm, thick lips.  Then she spread her arms out wide, smote one palm against the other, intertwined her fingers, and sweetly, as only Podolian wives can do it, began to coo: