And though this same Ossip was an artelui, and a director of the artel, his senior co-members bore him no affection, but, rather, looked upon him as a wag or trifler, and treated him as of no importance. And, similarly, the younger members of the artel liked well enough to listen to his tales, but declined to take him seriously, and, in some cases, regarded him with ill-concealed, or openly expressed, distrust. Once the Morduine, a man of education with whom, on occasions, I held discussions on intimate subjects, replied to a question of mine on the subject of Ossip: "I scarcely know. Goodness alone knows! No, I do not know anything about him." To which, after a pause, he added: "Once a fellow named Mikhailo, a clever fellow who is now dead, insulted Ossip by saying to him: 'Do you call yourself a man? Why, regarded as a workman, you're as lifeless as a doornail, while, seeing that you weren't born to be a master, you'll all your life continue chattering in corners, like a plummet swinging at the end of a string!' Yes, and that was true enough." Lastly, after another pause the Morduine concluded: "No matter. He is not such a bad sort." My own position among these men was a position of some awkwardness, for, a young fellow of only fifteen, I had been appointed by the contractor, a distant relative of mine, to the task of superintending the expenditure of material. That is to say, I had to see to it that the carpenters did not make away with nails, or dispose of planks in return for drink. Yet all the time my presence was practically useless, seeing that the men stole nails as though I were not even in existence and strove to show me that among them I was a person too many, a sheer incubus, and seized every opportunity of giving me covert jogs with a beam, and similarly affronting me. This, of course, made my relations with them highly difficult, embarrassing, and irksome; and though moments occurred when I longed to say something that might ingratiate me, and endeavoured to effect an advance in that direction, the words always failed me at the necessary juncture, and I found myself lying crushed as before under a burdensome sense of the superfluity of my existence. Again, if ever I tried to make an entry as to some material which had been used, Ossip would approach me, and, for instance, say: "Is it jotted down, eh? Then let me look at it." And, eyeing the notebook with a frown, he would add vaguely: "What a nice hand you write!" (He himself could write only in printing fashion, in the large scriptory characters of the Ecclesiastical Rubric, not in those of the ordinary kind.) "For example, that scoop there--what does IT say?" "It is the word 'Good.'" "'Good'? But what a slip-knot of a thing! And what are those words THERE, on THAT line?" "They say, 'Planks, 1 vershok by 9 arshini, 5.'" "No, six was the number used." "No, five." "Five? Why, the soldier broke one, didn't he?"