"Kind friends, you have given me three _greven_ too much." Some one cried gayly: "Take it all, my good woman,--all that your eyes fall upon. Why do you talk nonsense? No one can have too much." But Yaakov went to the old woman and said quite seriously: "Give me what you don't want; I will play cards with it." The people around laughed, thinking that the stoker was joking, but he went on urging the confused woman perseveringly: "Come, give it to me, woman! What do you want the money for? To-morrow you will be in the churchyard." They drove him away with abuse, but he said to me, shaking his head, and greatly surprised: "How funny people are! Why do they interfere in what does not concern them? She said herself that she had more than she wanted. And three _greven_ would have been very consoling to me." The very sight of money evidently pleased him. While he was talking he loved to clean the silver and brass on his breeches, and would polish coins till they shone. Moving his eyebrows up and down, he would gaze at them, holding them in his crooked fingers before his snub-nosed face. But he was not avaricious. One day he asked me to play with him, but I could not. "You don't know how?" he cried. "How is that? And you call yourself educated! You must learn. We will play for lumps of sugar." He won from me half a pound of the best sugar, and hid every lump in his furry cheek. As soon as he found that I knew how to play he said: "Now we will play seriously for money. Have you any money?" "I have five rubles." "And I have two." As may be imagined, he soon won from me. Desiring to have my revenge, I staked my jacket, worth five rubles, and lost. Then I staked my new boots, and lost again. Yaakov said to me, unwillingly, almost crossly: "No, you don't know how to play yet; you get too hot about it. You must go and stake everything, even your boots. I don't care for that sort of thing. Come, take back your clothes and your money,--four rubles,--and I will keep a ruble for teaching you. Agreed?" I was very grateful to him. "It is a thing to spit upon," he said in answer to my thanks. "A game is a game, just an amusement, you know; but you would turn it into a quarrel. And even in a quarrel it does n't do to get too warm. You want to calculate the force of your blows. What have you to get in a stew about? You are young; you must learn to hold yourself in. The first time you don't succeed; five times you don't succeed; the seventh time--spit! Go away, get yourself cool, and have another go! That is playing the game." He delighted me more and more, and yet he jarred on me. Sometimes his stories reminded me of grandmother. There was a lot in him which attracted me, but his lifelong habit of dull indifference repelled me violently.