Coming to meet her is a little girl, all skin and bone. She has perhaps long and beautiful hair, but no time to attend to it. It is matted and ruffled, and the wind tears round and round and seizes whole locks with which he whips her narrow shoulders. She wears a thin, tattered frock, and the wind clings round her, seeking a hole through which to steal into her puny body. On her feet she wears a pair of top boots--of mud. She also walks unsteadily, first, because she is meeting the wind, and, secondly, because _her_ hands, too, are taken up. In her left one she carries a pair of big boots, a man's boots (her father's most likely), taking them to be mended. I need not suppose that they are going to the inn to be pawned for a bottle of brandy, because of the split soles. Her father has probably come home tired out with his work, her mother is cooking the supper, and she, the eldest daughter, has been sent out with the boots. They must be ready by to-morrow morning early--she hurries along--she knows that if her father does not get his boots by to-morrow, there will be no fire in the oven all day. She pants--the great boots are too heavy for such a little child. But the weight in her right hand is heavier, for she carries an immense journeyman's umbrella--and she carries it proudly--her father has trusted her with it! The child needs a lot of things: in winter, warmth--winter and summer, clothing, and all the year round, enough to eat. By way of compensation, there is excess in the size of her umbrella. I am sure that at this moment the rich lady with the parasol envies her. The little half-starved girl with the merry, roguish eyes, although the wind threatens to upset her every minute, smiles at me from out the picture: There, you see, we have our pleasures, too! As to that lady, I am laughing at her! On paying for my unfinished glass of tea, however, I am again reminded of my little beggar boy. He has no umbrella at all, no home awaits him, not even one with dry potatoes without butter, no little bit of a bed at the foot of father's or mother's. Even the unhappy lady would not find anything to envy him for. What made me think of him again? Aha, I remember! It flashed across me that for the ten kopeks which I paid for the scarcely-tasted tea, the poor little boy would have had a half-portion of soup or a piece of bread and a corner to sleep in. Why did I order the tea? At home the samovar is steaming, somebody sits waiting for me with a "ready" smile, on the table there is something to eat. I was ashamed not to order tea. Well, there is something in that, I say to console myself. There is an even stronger wind blowing outside than before. It tears at the roofs as if it were an anti-Semite, and the roofs, Jews. But the roofs are of iron, and they are at home. It descends with fury on the lamps in the street, but they remain erect like hero-sages at the time of the Inquisition.