"If it were a question of turning over thousands, yes. But to worry myself for the sake of making a few copecks, it is not worth while. No, I am just looking about; then I shall go into a monastery in Oranko. I am good-looking, powerful in muscle; I may take the fancy of some merchant's widow! Such things do happen. There was a Sergatzki boy who made his fortune in two years, and married a girl from these parts, from the town. He had to take an icon to her house, and she saw him." This was an obsession with him; he knew many tales of how taking service in a monastery had led people to an easy life. I did not care for these stories, nor did I like the trend of Phoma's mind, but I felt sure that he would go to a monastery. When the market was opened, Phoma, to every one's surprise, went as waiter to a tavern. I do not say that his mates were surprised, but they all began to treat him mockingly. On holidays they would all go together to drink tea, saying to one another: "Let us go and see our Phoma." And when they arrived at the tavern they would call out: "Hi, waiter! Curly mop, come here!" He would come to them and ask, with his head held high: "What can I get for you?" "Don't you recognize acquaintances now?" "I never recognize any one." He felt that his mates despised him and were making fun of him, and he looked at them with dully expectant eyes. His face might have been made of wood, but it seemed to say: "Well, make haste; laugh and be done with it." "Shall we give him a tip?" they would ask, and after purposely fumbling in their purses for a long time, they would give him nothing at all. I asked Phoma how he could go out as a waiter when he had meant to enter a monastery. "I never meant to go into a monastery!" he replied, "and I shall not stay long as a waiter." Four years later I met him in Tzaritzin, still a waiter in a tavern; and later still I read in a newspaper that Phoma Tuchkov had been arrested for an attempted burglary. The history of the mason, Ardalon, moved me deeply. He was the eldest and best workman in Petr's gang. This black-bearded, light-hearted man of forty years also involuntarily evoked the query, "Why was he not the master instead of Petr?" He seldom drank vodka and hardly ever drank too much; he knew his work thoroughly, and worked as if he loved it; the bricks seemed to fly from his hands like red doves. In comparison with him, the sickly, lean Petr seemed an absolutely superfluous member of the gang. He used to speak thus of his work: "I build stone houses for people, and a wooden coffin for myself." But Ardalon laid his bricks with cheerful energy as he cried: "Work, my child, for the glory of God." And he told us all that next spring he would go to Tomsk, where his brother-in-law had undertaken a large contract to build a church, and had invited him to go as overseer.