nor sighing. The young people gave
her a good funeral and began their life together. For just six months
they got on splendidly, and then all of a sudden another misfortune. It
never rains but it pours: Vasya was summoned to the recruiting office to
draw lots for the service. He was taken, poor chap, for a soldier, and
not even granted exemption. They shaved his head and packed him off to
Poland. It was God's will; there was nothing to be done. When he said
good-bye to his wife in the yard, he bore it all right; but as he
glanced up at the hay-loft and his pigeons for the last time, he burst
out crying. It was pitiful to see him.

"At first Mashenka got her mother to stay with her, that she mightn't
be dull all alone; she stayed till the baby--this very Kuzka here--was
born, and then she went off to Oboyan to another married daughter's
and left Mashenka alone with the baby. There were five peasants--the
carriers--a drunken saucy lot; horses, too, and dray-carts to see
to, and then the fence would be broken or the soot afire in the
chimney--jobs beyond a woman, and through our being neighbours, she got
into the way of turning to me for every little thing.... Well, I'd go
over, set things to rights, and give advice.... Naturally, not without
going indoors, drinking a cup of tea and having a little chat with her.
I was a young fellow, intellectual, and fond of talking on all sorts of
subjects; she, too, was well-bred and educated. She was always neatly
dressed, and in summer she walked out with a sunshade. Sometimes I would
begin upon religion or politics with her, and she was flattered and
would entertain me with tea and jam.... In a word, not to make a long
story of it, I must tell you, old man, a year had not passed before the
Evil One, the enemy of all mankind, confounded me. I began to notice
that any day I didn't go to see her, I seemed out of sorts and dull. And
I'd be continually making up something that I must see her about: 'It's
high time,' I'd say to myself, 'to put the double windows in for the
winter,' and the whole day I'd idle away over at her place putting in
the windows and take good care to leave a couple of them over for the
next day too.

"'I ought to count over Vasya's pigeons, to see none of them have
strayed,' and so on. I used always to be talking to her across the
fence, and in the end I made a little gate in the fence so as not to
have to go so far round. From womankind comes much evil into the