"It doesn't say so in your stories," observed the stoker with truth, and I suddenly realized clearly that the greater number of the books which I had read hardly ever spoke of the heroes working, or of the hardships they had to encounter. "Now I am going to sleep for a short time," said Yaakov, and falling back where he lay, he was soon snoring peacefully. In the autumn, when the shores of the Kama were turning red, the leaves were taking a golden tinge, and the crosswise beams of the sun grew pallid, Yaakov unexpectedly left the boat. The day before, he had said to me: "The day after to-morrow, you and I, my lad, will be in Perm. We will go to the bath, steam ourselves to our hearts' content, and when we have finished will go together to a Traktir. There is music and it is very pleasant. I like to see them playing on those machines." But at Sarapulia there came on the boat a stout man with a flabby, womanish face. He was beardless and whiskerless. His long warm cloak, his cap with ear flaps of fox fur, increased his resemblance to a woman. He at once engaged a small table near the kitchen, where it was warmest, asked for tea to be served to him, and began to drink the yellow boiling liquid. As he neither unfastened his coat nor removed his cap, he perspired profusely. A fine rain fell unweariedly from the autumn mist. It seemed to me that when this man wiped the sweat from his face with his checked handkerchief, the rain fell less, and in proportion as he began to sweat again, it began to rain harder. Very soon Yaakov appeared, and they began to look at a map together. The passenger drew his finger across it, but Yaakov said: "What's that? Nothing! I spit upon it!" "All right," said the passenger, putting away the map in a leather bag which lay on his knees. Talking softly together, they began to drink tea. Before Yaakov went to his watch, I asked him what sort of a man this was. He replied, with a laugh: "To see him, he might be a dove. He is a eunuch, that's what he is. He comes from Siberia--a long way off! He is amusing; he lives on a settlement." Setting his black strong heels on the deck, like hoofs, once again he stopped, and scratched his side. "I have hired myself to him as a workman. So when we get to Perm, I shall leave the boat, and it will be good-by to you, lad ? We shall travel by rail, then by river, and after that by horses. For five weeks we shall have to travel, to get to where the man has his colony." "Did you know him before?" I asked, amazed at his sudden decision. "How should I know him? I have never seen him before. I have never lived anywhere near him." In the morning Yaakov, dressed in a short, greasy fur-coat, with sandals on his bare feet, wearing Medvyejenok's tattered, brimless straw hat, took hold of my arm with his iron grasp, and said: