And with what a refinement of prudent conceit he watches him while he is delivering his narrative! In his accent, in every word, this can be perceived. Where did he acquire this particular kind of artfulness? During the long evening of one of the first days of my confinement, I was listening to one of these conversations. Thanks to my inexperience I took the narrator for the malefactor, a man with an iron character, a man to whom Petroff was nothing. The narrator, Luka Kouzmitch, had “knocked over” a Major, for no other reason but that it pleased him to do so. This Luka Kouzmitch was the smallest and thinnest man in all the barracks. He was from the South. He had been a serf, one of those not attached to the soil, but who serve their masters as domestics. There was something cutting and haughty in his demeanour. He was a little bird, but had a beak and nails. The convicts sum up a man instinctively. They thought nothing of this one, he was too susceptible and too full of conceit. That evening he was stitching a shirt, seated on his camp-bedstead. Close to him was a narrow-minded, stupid, but good-natured and obliging fellow, a sort of Colossus, Kobylin by name. Luka often quarrelled with him in a neighbourly way, and treated him with a haughtiness which, thanks to his good-nature, Kobylin did not notice in the least. He was knitting a stocking, and listening to Luka with an indifferent air. Luka spoke in a loud voice and very distinctly. He wished every one to hear him, though he was apparently speaking only to Kobylin. “I was sent away,” said Luka, sticking his needle in the shirt, “as a brigand.” “How long ago?” asked Kobylin. “When the peas are ripe it will be just a year. Well, we got to K----v, and I was put into the convict prison. Around me there were a dozen men from Little Russia, well-built, solid, robust fellows, like oxen, and how quiet! The food was bad, the Major of the prison did what he liked. One day passed, then another, and I soon saw that all these fellows were cowards. “‘You are afraid of such an idiot?’ I said to them. “‘Go and talk to him yourself,’ and they burst out laughing like brutes that they were. I held my tongue. “There was one fellow so droll, so droll,” added the narrator, now leaving Kobylin to address all who chose to listen. “This droll fellow was telling them how he had been tried, what he had said, and how he had wept with hot tears. “‘There was a dog of a clerk there,’ he said, ‘who did nothing but write and take down every word I said. I told him I wished him at the devil, and he actually wrote that down. He troubled me so, that I quite lost my head.’” “Give me some thread, Vasili; the house thread is bad, rotten.” “There is some from the tailor’s shop,” replied Vasili, handing it over to him. “Well, but about this Major?” said Kobylin, who had been quite forgotten.