I had come to know these people during the second part of my life at the draughtsman's house. Every Sunday they used to appear in the kitchen, grave, important-looking, with pleasant speech, and with words which had a new flavor for me. All these solid-looking peasants had seemed to me then to be easy to read, good through and through, all pleasantly different from the spiteful, thieving, drunken inhabitants of the Kunavin and its environs. The plasterer, Shishlin, pleased me most of all, and I actually asked if I might join his gang of workmen. But scratching his golden brow with a white finger, he gently refused to have me. "It is too soon for you," he said. "Our work is not easy; wait another year." Then throwing up his handsome head, he asked: "You don't like the way you are living? Never mind, have patience; learn to live a life of your own, and then you will be able to bear it!" I do not know all that I gained from this good advice, but I remember it gratefully. These people used to come to my master's house every Sunday morning, sit on benches round th? kitchen-table, and talk of interesting things while they waited for my master. When he came, he greeted them loudly and gayly, shaking-their strong hands, and then sat down in the chief corner. They produced their accounts and bundles of notes, the workmen placed their tattered account-books on the table, and the reckoning up for the week began. Joking and bantering, the master would try to prove them wrong in their reckoning, and they did the same to him. Sometimes there was a fierce dispute, but more often friendly laughter. "Eh, you're a dear man; you were born a rogue!" the workmen would say to the master. And he answered, laughing in some confusion: "And what about you, wild fowl? There's as much roguery about you as about me!" "How should we be anything else, friend?" agreed Ephimushka, but grave Petr said: "You live by what you steal; what you earn you give to God and the emperor." "Well, then I 'll willingly make a burnt offering of you," laughed the master. They led him on good-naturedly: "Set fire to us, you mean?" "Burn us in a fiery furnace?" Gregory Shishl in, pressing his luxuriant beard to his breast with his hands, said in a sing-song voice: "Brothers, let us do our business without cheating. If we will only live honestly, how happy and peaceful we shall be, eh? Shall we not, dear people?" His blue eyes darkened, grew moist; at that moment he looked wonderfully handsome. His question seemed to have upset them all; they all turned away from him in confusion. "A peasant does not cheat much," grumbled good-looking Osip with a sigh, as if he pitied the peasant. The dark bricklayer, bending his round-shouldered back over the table, said thickly: "Sin is like a sort of bog; the farther you go, the more swampy it gets!" And the master said to them, as if he were making a speech: