ughed, and shrinking from the cold, got
out of bed. In accordance with years of habit, he stood for a long
time before the ikon, saying his prayers. He repeated "Our Father,"
"Hail Mary," the Creed, and mentioned a long string of names. To
whom those names belonged he had forgotten years ago, and he only
repeated them from habit. From habit, too, he swept his room and
entry, and set his fat little four-legged copper samovar. If Zotov
had not had these habits he would not have known how to occupy his
old age.

The little samovar slowly began to get hot, and all at once,
unexpectedly, broke into a tremulous bass hum.

"Oh, you've started humming!" grumbled Zotov. "Hum away then, and
bad luck to you!"

At that point the old man appropriately recalled that, in the
preceding night, he had dreamed of a stove, and to dream of a stove
is a sign of sorrow.

Dreams and omens were the only things left that could rouse him to
reflection; and on this occasion he plunged with a special zest
into the considerations of the questions: What the samovar was
humming for? and what sorrow was foretold by the stove? The dream
seemed to come true from the first. Zotov rinsed out his teapot and
was about to make his tea, when he found there was not one teaspoonful
left in the box.

"What an existence!" he grumbled, rolling crumbs of black bread
round in his mouth. "It's a dog's life. No tea! And it isn't as
though I were a simple peasant: I'm an artisan and a house-owner.
The disgrace!"

Grumbling and talking to himself, Zotov put on his overcoat, which
was like a crinoline, and, thrusting his feet into huge clumsy
golosh-boots (made in the year 1867 by a bootmaker called Prohoritch),
went out into the yard. The air was grey, cold, and sullenly still.
The big yard, full of tufts of burdock and strewn with yellow leaves,
was faintly silvered with autumn frost. Not a breath of wind nor a
sound. The old man sat down on the steps of his slanting porch, and
at once there happened what happened regularly every morning: his
dog Lyska, a big, mangy, decrepit-looking, white yard-dog, with
black patches, came up to him with its right eye shut. Lyska came
up timidly, wriggling in a frightened way, as though her paws were
not touching the earth but a hot stove, and the whole of her wretched
figure was expressive of abjectness. Zotov pretended not to notice
her, but when she faintly wagged her tail, and, wriggling as before,
licked his golosh, he