"She's a bitter radish too, that Aunty Orlíkha!" he confided to Levtchénko, in an undertone, with a sly wink in the direction where Matréna was sitting. "Well, I'll prescribe that sort of a radish for you, when you need one!" threatened the Little Russian, laughing behind his mustache. He was fond of impudent Tchízhik, and listened attentively to him, being aware that all the secrets of the court-yard were known to Tchízhik. "You can't do any fishing round her,"--explained Tchízhik, paying no attention to the threat.--"Maxím the painter tried it, and bang! she let fly such a slap in the face at him! I heard it myself ... a healthy whack! Straight in his ugly face ... just as though it had been a drum!" Half-child, half-man, in spite of his fifteen years, lively and impressionable, he eagerly absorbed, like a sponge, the dirt of the life around him, and on his brow there was a thin wrinkle, which showed that Sénka Tchízhik was given to thinking. ... It was dark in the court-yard. Above it shone a quadrangular bit of blue sky, all glittering with stars, and surrounded by lofty roofs, so that the court seemed to be a deep pit, when one looked up out of it. In one corner of this pit sat a tiny female form, resting after her beating, and awaiting her drunken husband.... * The Orlóffs had been married three years. They had had a child, but after living for about a year and a half, it died; neither of them mourned it long, being consoled with the hope that they would have another. The cellar, in which they had taken up their abode, was a large, long, dark room with a vaulted ceiling. Directly at the door stood a huge Russian stove, facing the windows; between it and the wall a narrow passage led into a square space, lighted by two windows, which opened on the court-yard. The light fell through them into the cellar in slanting, turbid streaks, and the atmosphere in the room was damp, dull, dead life pulsated somewhere, tar away, up above, but only faint, ill-defined sounds of it were wafted hither, and fell, together with the dust, into the Orlóffs' hole, in a sort of formless, colorless flakes. Opposite the stove, against the wall, stood a wooden double-bed, with print curtains of a cinnamon-brown dotted with pink flowers; opposite the bed, against the other wall, was a table, on which they drank tea and dined; and between the bed and the wall, the husband and wife worked, in the two streaks of light. Cockroaches travelled indolently over the walls, feeding on the bread-crumbs with which various little pictures from old newspapers were stuck to the plaster; melancholy flies flitted about everywhere, buzzing tiresomely, and the little pictures, which they had covered with specks, stood out like dark spots against the dirty-gray background of the walls.