those marshes into a lagoon outright. The
fissure in question is named "The Great Ravine," and has its steep
flanks so overgrown with chestnuts and laburnums that even in
summertime its recesses are cool and moist, and so serve as a
convenient trysting place for the poorer lovers of the suburb and the
town, and witness their tea drinkings and frequently fatal quarrels, as
well as being used by the more well-to-do for a dumping ground for
rubbish of the nature of deceased dogs, cats, and horses.

Pleasantly singing, there scours the bottom of the ravine the brook
known as the Zhandarmski Spring, a brook celebrated throughout Buev for
its crystal-cold water, which is so icy of temperature that even on a
burning day it will make the teeth ache. This water the denizens of
Tolmachikha account to be their peculiar property; wherefore they are
proud of it, and drink it to the exclusion of any other, and so live to
a green old age which in some cases cannot even reckon its years. And
by way of a livelihood, the men of the suburb indulge in hunting,
fishing, fowling, and thieving (not a single artisan proper does the
suburb contain, save the cobbler Gorkov--a thin, consumptive skeleton
of surname Tchulan); while, as regards the women, they, in winter, sew
and make sacks for Zimmel's mill, and pull tow, and in summer they
scour the plantation of the monastery for truffles and other produce,
and the forest on the other side of the river for huckleberries. Also,
two of the suburb's women practise as fortune tellers, while two others
conduct an easy and highly lucrative trade in prostitution.

The result is that the town, as distinguished from the suburb, believes
the men of the latter to be one and all thieves, and the women and
girls of the suburb to be one and all disreputable characters. Hence
the town strives always to restrict and extirpate the suburb, while the
suburbans retaliate upon the townsfolk with robbery and arson and
murder, while despising those townsfolk for their parsimony, decorum,
and avarice, and detesting the settled, comfortable mode of life which
they lead.

So poor, for that matter, is the suburb that never do even beggars
resort thither, save when drunk. No, the only creatures which resort
thither are dogs which subsist no one knows how as predatorily they
roam from court to court with tails tucked between their flanks, and
bloodless tongues hanging down, and legs ever prepared, on sighting a
human bei