he first-floor, and Masha showed herself at it.

"Sergey Vassilitch!" she called.

"What is it?"

"I tell you what . . ." said Masha, evidently thinking of something
to say. "I tell you what. . . Polyansky said he would come in a day
or two with his camera and take us all. We must meet here."

"Very well."

Masha vanished, the window was slammed, and some one immediately
began playing the piano in the house.

"Well, it is a house!" thought Nikitin while he crossed the street.
"A house in which there is no moaning except from Egyptian pigeons,
and they only do it because they have no other means of expressing
their joy!"

But the Shelestovs were not the only festive household. Nikitin had
not gone two hundred paces before he heard the strains of a piano
from another house. A little further he met a peasant playing the
balalaika at the gate. In the gardens the band struck up a potpourri
of Russian songs.

Nikitin lived nearly half a mile from the Shelestoys' in a flat of
eight rooms at the rent of three hundred roubles a year, which he
shared with his colleague Ippolit Ippolititch, a teacher of geography
and history. When Nikitin went in this Ippolit Ippolititch, a
snub-nosed, middle-aged man with a reddish beard, with a coarse,
good-natured, unintellectual face like a workman's, was sitting at
the table correcting his pupils' maps. He considered that the most
important and necessary part of the study of geography was the
drawing of maps, and of the study of history the learning of dates:
he would sit for nights together correcting in blue pencil the maps
drawn by the boys and girls he taught, or making chronological
tables.

"What a lovely day it has been!" said Nikitin, going in to him. "I
wonder at you--how can you sit indoors?"

Ippolit Ippolititch was not a talkative person; he either remained
silent or talked of things which everybody knew already. Now what
he answered was:

"Yes, very fine weather. It's May now; we soon shall have real
summer. And summer's a very different thing from winter. In the
winter you have to heat the stoves, but in summer you can keep warm
without. In summer you have your window open at night and still are
warm, and in winter you are cold even with the double frames in."

Nikitin had not sat at the table for more than one minute before
he was bored.

"Good-night!" he said, getting up and yawning. "I wanted to tell
you something romantic concerning myself, but you are--ge