"Victor is making fun of you because he says you write poetry, Pyeshkov. Is that true? Well then, read it to me!" It would have been awkward to refuse, and I read several of my poetical compositions. These evidently did not please him, but he said: "Stick to it! Stick to it! You may become a Pushkin; have you read Pushkin?" "'Do the goblins have funeral rites? Are the witches given in marriage?'" In his time people still believed in goblins, but he did not believe in them himself. Of course he was just joking. "Ye-es, brother," he drawled thoughtfully, "you ought to have been taught, but now it is too late. The devil knows what will become of you! I should hide that note-book of yours more carefully, for if the women get hold of it, they will laugh at you. Women, brother, love to touch one on a weak spot." For some time past my master had been quiet and thoughtful; he had a trick of looking about him cautiously, and the sound of the bell startled him. Sometimes he would give way to a painful irritability about trifles, would scold us all, and rush out of the house, returning drunk late at night. One felt that something had come into his life which was known only to himself, which had lacerated his heart; and that he was living not sensibly, or willingly, but simply by force of habit. On Sundays from dinner-time till nine o'clock I was free to go out and about, and the evenings I spent at a tavern in Yamski Street. The host, a stout and always perspiring man, was passionately fond of singing, and the chorister's of most of the churches knew this, and used to frequent his house. He treated them with vodka, beer, or tea, for their songs. The choristers were a drunken and uninteresting set of people; they sang unwillingly, only for the sake of the hospitality, and almost always it was church music. As certain of the pious drunkards did not consider that the tavern was the place for them, the host used to invite them to his private room, and I could only hear the singing through the door. But frequently peasants from the villages, and artisans came. The tavern-keeper himself used to go about the town inquiring for singers, asking the peasants who came in on market-days, and inviting them to his house. The singer was always given a chair close to the bar, his back to a cask of vodka; his head was outlined against the bottom of the cask as if it were in a round frame. The best singer of all--and they were always particularly good singers--was the small, lean harness-maker, Kleshtchkov, who looked as if he had been squeezed, and had tufts of red hair on his head. His little nose gleamed like that of a corpse; his benign, dreamy eyes were immovable. Sometimes he closed his eyes, leaned the back of his head against the bottom of the cask, protruding his chest, and in his soft but all-conquering tenor voice sang the quick moving: "Ekh! how the fog has fallen upon the clean fields already! And has hidden the distant roads!"