The echo of my footsteps, with the creaking snow under my boots, played sharply and shrilly round the two unheated rooms through which I was obliged to pass in order to reach the inhabited part of the house. It seemed to be even colder here than out of doors. The windows were boarded up. But although in the impenetrable darkness I hit against fragments of pots and other useless lumber at every turn, and they tumbled about or broke with a crash, though the door grated on its rusty hinges, none of the people living there even looked out or paid any attention to it. At last I came into the inhabited part of the house. It was not much lighter in the large room than in those through which I had just passed. A thin tallow candle on a shoemaker's low bench barely lighted one corner of the room. Two people were working at the bench. The one sitting nearer me, a tall thin man, unmistakably a born shoemaker, was knocking wooden pegs into a sole with an expert and sure hand. He had not been long in the town, but he already had plenty of work, and would be certain not to remain long in this solitude. The second, sitting farther off, a handsome man, was considerably shorter than Pan Józef. He was planing and polishing a heel, but slowly, without that deftness with which Pan Józef worked. One glance at the short shoemaker's face would have been enough to convince the most ardent opponent of all theories on heredity that this man had not always sat at a cobbler's bench. As a matter of fact, Pan Jan Horodelski had once been a medical student; later ... but what he was later could not be told in two evenings. He had now been a shoemaker for five years, and, to speak the candid truth, a drunken shoemaker. His bad habit did not allow him even to think of carrying on business for himself; he therefore wandered round to all the local workshops, using other people's tools, and finding life very hard. Each master took a large percentage for the tools, and it is probable that Pan Józef charged him no less than other masters did. His spirit had once been proud and audacious, but life had bruised it and trodden it into the dust. Some souls emerge thence not only beautiful and noble, but even strong. Horodelski had not that strength which braves all storms, and was now a permanent inhabitant of this solitude. His days were numbered; the intellect and knowledge he once possessed made him now fully conscious of his condition and filled up his cup of bitterness, the depth of which was known only to himself.