“What’s to be done with such men?—The first gendarme who comes by appals them!... If they were commanded to obey a gendarme’s boot, they would!—Sheep, silly sheep, all of them!” he thought, with mixed feelings of bitterness and compassion. “True, we are all badly off—each one of us wriggling like a tortured eel! And everyone is so wretched, he can hardly breathe: why should he trouble about things that concern him less! Ah, poor people, so benighted, so miserable! They do not so much as know what they need!” And his heart went out to them, afflicted at the thought of their misery. “Swine find it hard to raise their snouts to the sky—and so do men!” So he thought, sorely troubled, but yet got no profit of his pain, further than the feeling that he himself was in as bad a case as anyone else—perhaps worse. “Only those can live their lives contentedly who never think!” He waved his hand with a gesture of despair, and then walked on, plunged in so deep a reverie that he nearly stumbled over a Jew—a ragpicker—sitting at the edge of a cornfield. “Resting, are ye? Indeed, the heat is terrible,” he said, stopping for an instant. “Heat? We are in a furnace: ’tis a judgment of God!” the Jew ejaculated. Getting up, he passed a strap over his round old shoulders, and, thus harnessed to his wheelbarrow, set about pushing it along with infinite toil. It was chock-full of rags and wooden boxes; above these towered baskets of eggs and a coop full of chickens; and, the road being deep with sand, and the weather unbearably hot, he had to struggle along desperately, and sit down to rest every now and then. “Nuchim, you’ll be late, Sabbath is at hand,” he soliloquized, chiding himself with tears. “Push, Nuchim, push on! you’re strong as a horse! Now, Nuchim!—One—two—three!...” And with a cry of desperation, he would wheel the barrow on for a score of paces, and then stop again. Antek was for passing him by with a nod, but the Jew called to him earnestly: “Master Farmer, I pray you! Help me, and I will pay you well. I can no more, in truth I can no more!” And he fell forward against the handbarrow, breathless and as white as a sheet. Without a word, Antek turned round, threw his capote and boots on to the barrow, seized it by the handle and pushed it forward so lustily that the wheel hummed and the dust flew. The Jew trotted beside him, catching his breath as he went, and chattering by the way to interest his helper. “Only as far as the wood: the road is good there. ’Tis not far. And I’ll give you five whole kopeks!” “Confound your kopeks! Fool, do I care for your money? But ye Jews think money is everything in the world.”