Shishlin's workmen, numbering seven, treated him as one of themselves and not as their master, and behind his back they nicknamed him "The Calf." When he came to work and saw that they were lazy, he would take a trowel, or a spade, and artistically do the work himself, calling out coaxingly: "Set to work, children, set to work!" One day, carrying out the task which my master had angrily set me, I said to Grigori: "What bad workmen you have." He seemed surprised. "Why?"-- "This work ought to have been finished yesterday, and they won't finish it even to-day." "That is true;'they won't have time," he agreed, and after a silence he added cautiously: "Of course, I see that by rights I ought to dismiss them, but you see they are all my own people from my own village. And then again the punishment of God is that every man should eat bread by the sweat of his brow, and the punishment is for all of us--for you and me, too. But you and I labor less than they do, and--well, it would be awkward to dismiss them." He lived in a dream. He would walk along the deserted streets of the market-place, and suddenly halting on one of the bridges over the Obvodni Canal, would stand for a long time at the railings, looking into the water, at the sky, or into the distance beyond the Oka. If one overtook him and asked: "What are you doing?" "What?" he would reply, waking up and smiling confusedly. "I was just standing, looking about me a bit." "God has arranged everything very well, brother," he would often say. "The sky, the earth, the flowing rivers, the steamboats running. You can get on a boat and go where you like--to Riazan, or to Ribinsk, to Perm, to Astrakhan. I went to Riazan once. It was n't bad--a little town--but very dull, duller than Nijni. Our Nijni is wonderful, gay! And Astrakhan is still duller. There are a lot of Kalmucks there, and I don't like them. I don't like any of those Mordovans, or Kalmucks, Persians, or Germans, or any of the other nations." He spoke slowly; his words cautiously felt for sympathy in others, and always found it in the bricklayer, Petr. "Those are not nations, but nomads," said Petr with angry conviction. "They came into the world before Christ and they 'll go out of it before He comes again." Grigori became animated; he beamed. "That's it, isn't it? But I love a pure race like the Russians, my brother, with a straight look. I don't like Jews, either, and I cannot understand how they are the people of God. It is wisely arranged, no doubt." The slater added darkly: "Wisely--but there is a lot that is superfluous!" Osip listened to what they said, and then put in, mockingly and caustically: "There is much that is superfluous, and your conversation belongs to that category. Ekh! you babblers; you want a thrashing, all of you!"