One evening, in a little shelter on the boat, there sat a red-faced woman with a girl in a yellow coat and a new pink blouse. Both had been drinking. The woman smiled, bowed to every one, and said on the note O, like a church clerk: "Forgive me, my friends; I have had a little too much to drink. I have been tried and acquitted, and I have been drinking for joy." The girl laughed, too, gazing at the other passengers with glazed eyes. Pushing the woman away, she said: "But you, you plaguy creature--we know you." They had berths in the second-class cabin, opposite the cabin in which Jaakov Ivanich and Sergei slept. The woman soon disappeared somewhere or other, and Sergei took her place near the girl, greedily stretching his frog-like mouth. That night, when I had finished my work and had laid myself down to sleep on the table, Sergei came to me, and seizing me by the arm, said: "Come along! We are going to marry you." He was drunk. I tried to tear my arm away from him, but he struck me. "Come along!" Maxim came running in, also drunk, and the two dragged me along the deck to their cabin, past the sleeping passengers. But by the door of the cabin stood Smouri, and in the doorway, holding on to the jamb, Jaakov Ivanich. The girl stuck her elbow in his back, and cried in a drunken voice: "Make way!" Smouri got me out of the hands of Sergei and Maxim, seized them by the hair, and, knocking their heads together, moved away. They both fell down. "Asiatic!" he said to Jaakov, slamming the door on him. Then he roared as he pushed me along: "Get out of this!" I ran to the stern. The night was cloudy, the river black. In the wake of the boat seethed two gray lines of water leading to the invisible shore; between these two lines the barge dragged on its way. Now on the right, now on the left appeared red patches of light, without illuminating anything. They disappeared, hidden by the sudden winding of the shore. After this it became still darker and more gruesome. The cook came and sat beside me, sighed deeply, and pulled at his cigarette. "So they were taking you to that creature? _Ekh!_ Dirty beasts! I heard them trying." "Did you take her away from them?" "Her?" He abused the girl coarsely, and continued in a sad tone: "It is all nastiness here. This boat is worse than a village. Have you ever lived in a village?" "No." "In a village there is nothing but misery, especially in the winter." Throwing his cigarette overboard, he was silent. Then he spoke again. "You have fallen among a herd of swine, and I am sorry for you, my little one. I am sorry for all of them, too. Another time I do not know what I should have done. Gone on my knees and prayed. What are you doing, sons of ----? What are you doing, blind creatures? Camels!" The steamer gave a long-drawn-out hoot, the tow-rope splashed in the water, the lights of lanterns jumped up and down, showing where the harbor was. Out of the darkness more lights appeared.