"Hah, hah, hah!" Porankiewicz would laugh good-naturedly; "only the ground, the ground, my dear sir, will straighten me. I have sat working from morning till night since I was ten years old, and even steel gets bent at last." This man's life was a real Odyssey--only he, poor wretch! was no Odysseus. Ill-fortune had driven him through all parts of Siberia, and it was his lot to breathe his last in the worst of them. Babiński was asleep when I went in, but our conversation woke him, and he got up. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had a strong physique, and his dark face with large projecting eyebrows and surrounded by a beard as black as coal, always had a stern expression. I never saw him moved to tears; when something touched him very deeply, he would only blink hard and stretch out his hand for the vodka. He was indefatigable and competent and knew how to work and had worked like an ox until two years previously, when he had begun to drink desperately. "He has either been 'overlooked' or he has a screw loose," Bartek used to say of him. So now he seemed to be lost irretrievably, although under favourable circumstances he might perhaps yet draw himself out of the abyss into which he had rolled; for he was a man of exceptionally strong character. There are black cart-horses in Russia, called "bitiugs," which are bad-tempered, tall, and uncommonly strong. These animals walk with an even, measured step, and without the least effort. When you inquire what weight they are drawing, you will find that it is at least sixty poods, and they frequently draw a hundred. Babiński was like a "bitiug"; he even walked with a "bitiug's" step. When he slouched along with his big strides, it was never possible to keep pace with him. He always did the shopping in the town--bread, meat, and vodka--for no one walked as quickly as he, and no one could stand frost, however severe, as he could. He was a very hard man, and however much there might be weighing upon him, no one would have guessed it;--he was a real "bitiug." He also possessed a certain shrewdness, which often saved him from sinking altogether. It was he who had occupied this solitary house, and was the host _de jure_; but what was still more remarkable was that he had succeeded in finding a Yakut woman, as hideous as hell, who had consented to be cook in the colony, and was as honest as only savage people can be. Eudoxia was thus the sixth soul in this lonely place. Not all the inhabitants agreed to the festive celebration of Christmas. Bartek, and, stranger still, Horodelski, were most strongly opposed to it. "No, never!" Horodelski persisted. "I will drink as much vodka as you like, and eat what you give me--but Christmas? No!" And he only gave way after Bartek's refractoriness also had been softened by unusual eloquence on Porankiewicz's part.