"I'll tell you my story," said the other with a sudden burst of confidence. "When my father died he left but little, my mother was old, the land was all ploughed to death, what was I to do? Live I must--but how? I didn't know. I went to my wife's relations--a good house. Very well! 'Will you give your daughter her portion?' But no, my devil of a father-in-law would not shell out I was worrying him a long time about it--a whole year. What a business it was! And if I had had a hundred and fifty roubles in hand I could have paid off the Jew Antipas and stood on my legs again. 'Will you give Marfa her portion?' I said. 'No? Very well! Thank God she is not the only girl in the village.' I wanted to let him know that I would be my own master and quite free. Heigh-ho!" And the young fellow sighed. "And now there is nothing for it but to go to my relations after all. I had thought: look now! I'll go to the Kuban District. I'll scrape together two hundred roubles--and then I shall be a gentleman at large. But it was only so-so! It all ended in smoke. Now you'll have to go back to your relations, I said to myself ... as a day-labourer. I'm not fit to be my own master--no, I'm quite unfit. Alas! Alas!'" The young fellow had a violent disinclination to go to his relatives. Even his cheerful face grew dark and made itself miserable. He shifted heavily about on the ground, and drew Chelkash out of the reverie in which he had plunged while the other was talking. Chelkash also began to feel that the conversation was boring him, yet, for all that, he asked a few more questions: "And now where are you going?" "Where am I going? Why, home of course." "My friend, it is not 'of course' to me. You might be going to kick up your heels in Turkey for ought I know." "In Tur-tur-key?" stammered the youth. "Who of all the Orthodox would think of going there? What do you mean?" "I mean that you're a fool!" sighed Chelkash, and again he turned away from the speaker, and this time he felt an utter disinclination to waste another word upon him. There was something in this healthy country lad which revolted him. A troublesome, slowly ripening irritating feeling was stirring somewhere deep within him, and prevented him from concentrating his attention and meditating on all that had to be done that night. The snubbed young rustic kept murmuring to himself in a low voice, now and then glancing furtively at the vagabond. His cheeks were absurdly chubby, his lips were parted, and his lackadaisical eyes blinked ridiculously and preposterously often. Evidently he had never expected that his conversation with this moustached ragamuffin would have been terminated so quickly and so offensively. The ragamuffin no longer paid him the slightest attention. He was whistling reflectively as he sat on the post and beating time with his naked dirty paw. The rustic wanted to be quits with him.