Osip kept himself to himself, and it was impossible to guess with whom he would agree, or with whom he would quarrel. Sometimes he seemed inclined to agree calmly with all men, and with all their ideas; but more often one saw that he was bored by all of them, regarding them as half-witted, and he said to Petr, Grigori, and Ephimushka: "Ekh, you sow's whelps!" They laughed, not very cheerfully or willingly, but still they laughed. My master gave me five copecks a day for food. This was not enough, and I was rather hungry. Seeing this, the workmen invited me to breakfast and supper with them, and sometimes the contractors would invite me to a tavern to drink tea with them. I willingly accepted the invitations. I loved to sit among them and listen to their slow speeches, their strange stories. I gave them great pleasure by my readings out of church books. "You've stuck to books till you are fed up with them. Your crop is stuffed with them," said Osip, regarding me attentively with his cornflower-blue eyes. It was difficult to catch their expression; his pupils always seemed to be floating, melting. "Take it a drop at a time--it is better; and when you are grown up, you can be a monk and console the people by your teaching, and in that way you may become a millionaire." "A missioner," corrected the bricklayer in a voice which for some reason sounded aggrieved. "What?" asked Osip. "A missioner is what you mean! You are not deaf, are you?" "All right, then, a missioner, and dispute with heretics. And even those whom you reckon as heretics have the right to bread. One can live even with a heretic, if one exercises discretion." Grigori laughed in an embarrassed manner, and Petr said in his beard: "And wizards don't have a bad time of it, and other kinds of godless people." But Osip returned quickly: "A wizard is not a man of education; education is not usually a possession of the wizard." And he told me: "Now look at this; just listen. In our district there lived a peasant, Tushek was his name, an emaciated little man, and idle. He lived like a feather, blown about here and there by the wind, neither a worker nor a do-nothing. Well, one day he took to praying, because he had nothing else to do, and after wandering about for two years, he suddenly showed himself in a new character. His hair hung down over his shoulders; he wore a skull-cap, and a brown cassock of leather; he looked on all of us with a baneful eye, and said straight out: 'Repent, ye cursed!' And why not repent, especially if you happened to be a woman? And the business ran its course: Tushek overfed, Tushek drunk, Tushek having his way with the women to his heart's content--" The bricklayer interrupted him angrily: "What has that got to do with the matter, his overfeeding, or overdrinking?" "What else has to do with it, then?" "His words are all that matter." "Oh, I took no notice of his words; I am abundantly gifted with words myself."