Dusty, ground to powder by feet, wheels, and hoofs, littered and covered with dung, the pasture was already being deserted--the Fair was dispersing. But Tikhon Ilitch, as if with deliberate intent to spite some one or other, persisted in keeping his unsold horses there in the heat, and sat on and on in his cart. It seemed as if he were overwhelmed not so much by illness as by the spectacle of the great poverty, the vast wretchedness which, from time immemorial, had reigned over this town and its whole county. Lord God, what a country! Black-loam soil over three feet deep! But--what of that? Never did five years pass without a famine. The town was famous throughout all Russia as a grain mart--but not more than a hundred persons in the whole town ate their fill of the grain. And the Fair? Beggars, idiots, blind men, cripples--a whole regiment of them--and such monstrosities as it made one frightened and sick at the stomach to behold! V On a hot, sunny morning Tikhon Ilitch started homeward through the big Old Town. First he drove through the town and the bazaar, past the cathedral, across the shallow little river, which reeked with the sourly fetid odour of the tanyards, and beyond the river, up the hill, through the Black Suburb. In the bazaar he and his brother had once worked in Matorin’s shop. Now every one in the bazaar bowed low before him. In the Black Suburb his childhood had been passed. There, halfway up the hill, among the mud huts embedded in the ground, with their black and decaying roofs, in the midst of dung which lay drying in the sun for use as fuel, amid litter, ashes, and rags, it had been his great delight to race, with shrill shouting and whistling, after the poverty-stricken teacher of the county school--a malicious, depraved old man, long since expelled from his post, who wore felt boots summer and winter, under-drawers, and a short overcoat with a beaver collar which was peeling off. He had been known to the town by the peculiar nickname of “the Dog’s Pistol.” Not a trace was now left of that mud hut in which Tikhon Ilitch had been born and had grown up. On its site stood a small new house of planking, with a rusty sign over the entrance: “Ecclesiastical Tailor Soboleff.” Everything else in the Suburb was precisely as it had always been--pigs and hens in the narrow alleys; tall poles at the gateways, and on each pole a ram’s horn; the big pallid faces of the lace-makers peering forth from behind the pots of flowers in the tiny windows; bare-legged little urchins with one suspender over a shoulder, launching a paper snake with a tail of bast fibre; quiet flaxen-haired little girls engaged in their favourite play, burying a doll, beside the mound of earth encircling the house.