But then she gave him a superior glance, and would murmur: "Don't disturb me! You stupid old fool, don't you see how hard I am trying to please people? Those over there, of course, are only low fellows from among your own acquaintance, but if you don't interfere with me I shall soon have much more fashionable guests here, as you'll see." These illusions of hers were illuminated in a room with but two tallow dips, but Sali, her son, went out into the dark kitchen, sat down at the hearth and wept about father and mother. However, these first guests had soon their fill of this kind of sport, and began to stay away, and then went back to their old haunts where they got better drink and more rational conversation, and there they would laughingly comment on the queer peasant innkeepers. Only once in a while now a single guest of this type would drop in, usually to verify previous reports heard by him, and such a one found as a rule nothing more exciting to do than to yawn and gaze at the wall. Or perhaps a band of roystering blades, having heard the place spoken of by others, would wind up a jolly evening by a brief visit, and then there would be noise enough, but not much else, and the old couple could often not even thus be roused from their melancholy. For by that time both wife and husband had grown heartily sick of their bargain. The new style of living felt to him almost as lonesome and cold as the grave. For he who as a lifelong farmer had been used to see the sun rise, to hear and feel the wind blow, to breathe the pure air of the country from morning till night, and to have the sunshine come and go, was now cooped up within these dingy, hopeless walls, had to draw in his lungs with every breath the contaminated atmosphere of this miserable neighborhood, and when he thus dreamed day-dreams of the wide expanse of the fields he once owned and tilled, a dull sort of despair settled down on him like a pall. For hours and hours every day he would stare in a dark humor at the smoke-begrimed ceiling of his inn, having mostly little else to do, and dull visions of a future unrelieved by a single ray of hope would float across his saturnine mind. Insupportable his present life seemed to him then. Then a purposeless restlessness would come over him, when he would get up from his seat a dozen times an hour, run to the housedoor and peer out, then run back and resume his watch. The neighbors had already given him a nickname. The "wicked landlord," they dubbed him, because his glance was troubled and fierce.