servitude, but he still walks through the streets in broad daylight, and even intends to build a factory. The place of our teacher ought to be beside a good wife and half-a-dozen children, but he lies groveling in the public-house of Vaviloff. And then, there is yourself. You are going to seek a situation as boots or waiter, but I know that what you really ought to be is a soldier, for you are no fool, patient and understanding discipline, see the irony of it? Life shuffles us like cards, and it is only accidentally, and that only for a time, that we fall into our proper places!”

These farewell conversations often served as a preface to the continuation of their friendship, which again began with a good booze and got to the stage where the client much to his amazement would again find that he had spent his last farthing, the Captain would stand him a treat in return and they would drink away all they had.

Such repetitions did not affect in the least the good relations of the parties.

The teacher mentioned by the Captain was another of those customers who were reformed only in order that they should sin again. He had more in common with the Captain than any of the others, as far as his education was concerned, and this was probably why, having fallen as low as doss-house life, he was unable to rise again. It was only with him that Aristid Kuvalda could philosophize with the certainty of being understood. He valued this, and when the reformed teacher, having earned some money, prepared to leave the doss-house in order to get a corner in town for himself, Aristid Kuvalda took the news so sorrowfully and sadly, with such innumerable protestations of friendship, that the whole thing ended, as a rule, in their both getting drunk and spending all their savings. Probably Kuvalda arranged matters on purpose so that, much as the teacher desired it, he could not leave the doss-house. Was it possible for Aristid Kuvalda, a man of education (the remains of which still sparkled in his speeches) in whom the vagaries of fate had developed the habit of thinking, was it possible for him not to desire to keep the company of a man more like himself? We all know how to be sorry for ourselves.

This teacher had once taught at a normal school in a city on the Volga, but had been dismissed from his job. After this he had been a clerk in a tannery, a librarian, tried a few other professions, and finally, after passing examinations for the bar, and becoming a lawyer, he took to drink, and this brought him to the Captain’s doss-house. He was tall, round-shouldered, with a long pointed nose and a bald head. In his bony yellow face, on which grew a wedge-shaped beard, shone a pair of restless eyes, deeply sunk in their sockets, and the corners of his mouth dooped down sorrowfully. He earned his bread, or rather his drink, by reporting for the local papers. Sometimes he earned as much as fifteen rubles a week. These he gave to the Captain and said:

“Enough of all this. I am going back to the bosom of culture.”

“Very fine. As I heartily sympathize with your decision, Philip, I shall not give you another glass,” the Captain warned him sternly.

“I shall only be grateful to you…”

The Captain heard a timid demand of concession in his voice, and became still sterner.

“You may clamor for it, but I won’t.”

“As you like, then,” sighed the teacher, and went back to his reporting. But after a day or two he would stare with dreary and thirsty eyes from some corner at the Captain, anxiously waiting for his friend’s heart to soften.

The Captain, with crushing irony, spoke then of the shameful weakness of some characters, on the animal delight of intoxication, and on other subjects that suited the occasion. One must do him justice: he was genuinely captivated by his rôle of mentor and moralist, but the skeptical lodgers, watching him and listening to his exhortations to virtue, would whisper aside to each other: