y, shaking her head. "Lost!"

With her in her little house lived her adopted son, Prokofyi, a butcher,
a huge, clumsy fellow, of about thirty, with ginger hair and scrubby
moustache. When he met me in the hall, he would silently and
respectfully make way for me, and when he was drunk he would salute me
with his whole hand. In the evenings he used to have supper, and
through the wooden partition I could hear him snorting and snuffling as
he drank glass after glass.

"Mother," he would say in an undertone.

"Well," Karpovna would reply. She was passionately fond of him. "What is
it, my son?"

"I'll do you a favour, mother. I'll feed you in your old age in this
vale of tears, and when you die I'll bury you at my own expense. So I
say and so I'll do."

I used to get up every day before sunrise and go to bed early. We
painters ate heavily and slept soundly, and only during the night would
we have any excitement. I never quarrelled with my comrades. All day
long there was a ceaseless stream of abuse, cursing and hearty good
wishes, as, for instance, that one's eyes should burst, or that one
might be carried off by cholera, but, all the same, among ourselves we
were very friendly. The men suspected me of being a religious crank and
used to laugh at me good-naturedly, saying that even my own father
denounced me, and they used to say that they very seldom went to church
and that many of them had not been to confession for ten years, and
they justified their laxness by saying that a decorator is among men
like a jackdaw among birds.

My mates respected me and regarded me with esteem; they evidently liked
my not drinking or smoking, and leading a quiet, steady life. They were
only rather disagreeably surprised at my not stealing the oil, or going
with them to ask our employers for a drink. The stealing of the
employers' oil and paint was a custom with house-painters, and was not
regarded as theft, and it was remarkable that even so honest a man as
Radish would always come away from work with some white lead and oil.
And even respectable old men who had their own houses in Makarikha were
not ashamed to ask for tips, and when the men, at the beginning or end
of a job, made up to some vulgar fool and thanked him humbly for a few
pence, I used to feel sick and sorry.

With the customers they behaved like sly courtiers, and almost every day
I was reminded of Shakespeare's Polonius.

"There will probably be rain," a customer w