I went to work on the railway. During the whole of August there was wind and rain. It was damp and cold; the corn had now been gathered in the fields, and on the big farms where the reaping was done with machines, the wheat lay not in stacks, but in heaps; and I remember how those melancholy heaps grew darker and darker every day, and the grain sprouted. It was hard work; the pouring rain spoiled everything that we succeeded in finishing. We were not allowed either to live or to sleep in the station buildings and had to take shelter in dirty, damp, mud huts where the "railies" had lived during the summer, and at night I could not sleep from the cold and the bugs crawling over my face and hands. And when we were working near the bridges, then the "railies" used to come out in a crowd to fight the painters--which they regarded as sport. They used to thrash us, steal our trousers, and to infuriate us and provoke us to a fight; they used to spoil our work, as when they smeared the signal-boxes with green paint. To add to all our miseries Radish began to pay us very irregularly. All the painting on the line was given to one contractor, who subcontracted with another, and he again with Radish, stipulating for twenty per cent commission. The job itself was unprofitable; then came the rains; time was wasted; we did no work and Radish had to pay his men every day. The starving painters nearly came to blows with him, called him a swindler, a bloodsucker, a Judas, and he, poor man, sighed and in despair raised his hands to the heavens and was continually going to Mrs. Cheprakov to borrow money. VII Came the rainy, muddy, dark autumn, bringing a slack time, and I used to sit at home three days in the week without work, or did various jobs outside painting; such as digging earth for ballast for twenty copecks a day. Doctor Blagovo had gone to Petersburg. My sister did not come to see me. Radish lay at home ill, expecting to die every day. And my mood was also autumnal; perhaps because when I became a working man I saw only the seamy side of the life of our town, and every day made fresh discoveries which brought me to despair. My fellow townsmen, both those of whom I had had a low opinion before, and those whom I had thought fairly decent, now seemed to me base, cruel, and up to any dirty trick. We poor people were tricked and cheated in the accounts, kept waiting for hours in cold passages or in the kitchen, and we were insulted and uncivilly treated. In the autumn I had to paper the library and two rooms at the club. I was paid seven copecks a piece, but was told to give a receipt for twelve copecks, and when I refused to do it, a respectable gentleman in gold spectacles, one of the stewards of the club, said to me: "If you say another word, you scoundrel, I'll knock you down." And when a servant whispered to him that I was the son of Pologniev, the architect, then I got flustered and blushed, but he recovered himself at once and said: