Often, these expeditions were not without their risks. One day, two of the baker's workmen happened to drown in a bog; another time, they were taken in a police raid and passed the night in the station house. It was also at this time that Gorky frequented the company of several students, not care-free and happy ones, but miserable young fellows like those whom Turgenev described as "nourished by physical privations and moral sufferings." On leaving the bakery, where his health, very much weakened by the lack of air and by bad food, did not permit him to remain any longer, he joined those vagabonds, those wanderers, whose melancholy companion he had been, and whose painter and poet he was to be. In their company, he traveled through Russia in every sense of the word, now as a longshoreman, now as a wood-chopper. Whenever he had a copeck in his pocket he bought books and newspapers and spent the night reading them. He suffered hunger and cold; he slept in the open air in summer, and, in winter, in some refuge or cellar. The feverish activity of so keen an intellect in an organism so crushed had, as its consequence, one of the attempts at suicide which are so frequent among the younger generation of the Russians. In 1889, at the age of twenty-one, Gorky shot himself in the chest, but he did not succeed in killing himself. Soon afterwards, he became gate-keeper for the winter at Tzaratzine; but the summer had hardly come before he began his vagabondage again, in the course of which he undertook a thousand little jobs in order to keep himself alive. On the road, he noticed those pariahs whom society does not want or who do not want society. And of these, in his short stories, he has created immortal types. Life was still very hard for him at this time. He has given us a moving sketch of it in his story entitled: "Once in Autumn." The hero, who is none other than the author himself, passes the night under an old, upturned boat, in the company of a prostitute who is just as poor and just as abandoned as himself. They have broken into a booth in order to steal enough bread to keep them from starving. Gorky is sad; he wants to weep; but the poor girl, miserable as she is, consoles him and covers him with kisses.