ce. Our
Whitebrow has taken to sleeping with the sheep in the warm. Only
he hasn't the sense to go in at the door, but always tries to wriggle
in by the roof. The other night he tore a hole in the roof and went
off on the spree, the rascal, and now he has come back and scratched
away the roof again."

"Stupid dog."

"Yes, there is a spring snapped in his brain. I do detest fools,"
sighed Ignat, clambering on to the stove. "Come, man of God, it's
early yet to get up. Let us sleep full steam! . . ."

In the morning he called Whitebrow, smacked him hard about the ears,
and then showing him a stick, kept repeating to him:

"Go in at the door! Go in at the door! Go in at the door!"

KASHTANKA

_(A Story)_

I

_Misbehaviour_

A YOUNG dog, a reddish mongrel, between a dachshund and a "yard-dog,"
very like a fox in face, was running up and down the pavement looking
uneasily from side to side. From time to time she stopped and,
whining and lifting first one chilled paw and then another, tried
to make up her mind how it could have happened that she was lost.

She remembered very well how she had passed the day, and how, in
the end, she had found herself on this unfamiliar pavement.

The day had begun by her master Luka Alexandritch's putting on his
hat, taking something wooden under his arm wrapped up in a red
handkerchief, and calling: "Kashtanka, come along!"

Hearing her name the mongrel had come out from under the work-table,
where she slept on the shavings, stretched herself voluptuously and
run after her master. The people Luka Alexandritch worked for lived
a very long way off, so that, before he could get to any one of
them, the carpenter had several times to step into a tavern to
fortify himself. Kashtanka remembered that on the way she had behaved
extremely improperly. In her delight that she was being taken for
a walk she jumped about, dashed barking after the trains, ran into
yards, and chased other dogs. The carpenter was continually losing
sight of her, stopping, and angrily shouting at her. Once he had
even, with an expression of fury in his face, taken her fox-like
ear in his fist, smacked her, and said emphatically: "Pla-a-ague
take you, you pest!"

After having left the work where it had been bespoken, Luka
Alexandritch went into his sister's and there had something to eat
and drink; from his sister's he had gone to see a bookbinder he
knew; from the bookbinder's to a tavern, from the tavern