They found shelter, quite at the end of the town, near the market-place, in a big grey house; all round its walls leant outbuildings of every kind, some comparatively recent, others as old as the house itself, and of the same dirty grey colour. The doors and windows were warped, and everything in the house creaked and cracked. The outbuildings, the fence, the gates, everything was falling to pieces together, and the whole formed a mass of half-rotten wood overgrown with greenish moss. The window panes were dim with age; a couple of beams in the front wall bulged right out, and altogether the house was an image of its owner, who used it as a tavern. He, too, was old and grey; the eyes in his worn face were like the glass panes in the windows; as he walked, he leant heavily on a thick staff--evidently it was not easy for him to carry his big paunch--and he, too, creaked and cracked all the time. Uncle Terenti established himself in one of the countless corners of the building--in a cellar, on a bench by a window opening on a corner of the courtyard. In this corner lay a great rubbish heap, and an old sweet-scented lime tree stood there between two elder bushes. It was three days after their arrival before the proprietor of the house noticed Ilya for the first time, as he tried to hide behind the rubbish heap and stared with terrified eyes. "Where do you belong, youngster? Hey!" he asked in his creaking voice, pointing at Ilya with his stick. "How did you come here? Hey!" Ilya blinked and said nothing. "Hullo, where does this youngster belong here? Send him off! out with you, you rascal! Wait a bit, I'll show you!--Hey!--Oh, you scamp! What--you belong to the man who does the washing up, do you? Are you his son? Not? Oh! a relation are you? The humpbacked rascal might have said he had a relation with him! Now then, Peter, what are you looking at? The humpback has a relation with him! What's the meaning of that? That won't do!" The potman Petrusha put his red face out of the bar window opening on the courtyard and shouted, shaking his curly head: "He's only got the youngster for a little while. Take, care Vassily Dorimendontytch--he's a poor orphan--I know about it--but if you don't like it, he shall clear out at once." When Ilya heard that he was to go away, he began to scream with all his might, then darted across like an arrow and slipped through the window into the cellar like a mouse into its hole. There he threw himself on the bench, buried his head in his uncle's coat and began to cry, quivering from head to foot. But his uncle came and soothed him: "No! No! don't be frightened! He only shouts like that to make pretence. He's going silly with age; he isn't the chief person here--it's Petrusha. Petrusha settles everything here. Just be friendly with him, be very polite to him! And as for the landlord--he doesn't count for anything!"