"Evidently fortune flies around like a wheel: one it lifts up, another it takes down. Well, does the old man pine?" "Who knows? He lives quietly and peaceably, and works well." Then the guest said: "May I speak with him? I should like to ask him about his life." "Of course you may," said the master, and he called out of the tent: "Babay!" (This means "grandfather" in the Bashkia language.) "Come in and drink some kumys, and bring your wife with you!" Ilyás came in with his wife. He exchanged greetings with the guests and with the master, said a prayer, and knelt down at the door; but his wife went back of a curtain and sat down with the mistress. A bowl of kumys was handed to Ilyás. Ilyás saluted the guests and the master, made a bow, drank a little, and put down the bowl. "Grandfather," the guest said to him, "I suppose it makes you feel bad to look at us and think of your former life, considering what fortune you had and how hard your life is now." But Ilyás smiled and said: "If I should tell you about my happiness and unhappiness, you would not believe me,--you had better ask my wife. She is a woman, and what is in her heart is on her tongue: she will tell you all the truth about this matter." And the guest spoke to her behind the curtain: "Well, granny, tell us how you judge about your former happiness and present sorrow." And Sham-shemagi spoke from behind the curtain: "I judge like this: My husband and I lived for fifty years trying to find happiness, and we did not find it; but now it is the second year that we have nothing left and that we live as labourers, and we have found that happiness and need no other." The guests were surprised and the master marvelled, and he even got up to throw aside the curtain and to look at the old woman. But the old woman was standing with folded hands, smiling and looking at her husband, and the old man was smiling, too. The old woman said once more: "I am telling you the truth, without any jest: for half a century we tried to find happiness, and so long as we were rich, we did not find it; now nothing is left, and we are working out,--and we have come to have such happiness that we wish for no other.". "Wherein does your happiness lie?"