array themselves for the morrow's festival, and,
meanwhile, chattering to one another, or shouting to plump infants
which may be seen bathing in the dust like sparrows, or picking up
handfuls of sand, and tossing them into the air.

Sheltered from the wind by the churchyard wall, there may be seen also,
as they sprawl on the dry, faded herbage, a score of "strollers for
work" that is to say, of folk who, a community apart, consist of
"nowhere people," of dreamers who live constantly in expectation of
some stroke of luck, some kindly smile from fortune, and of wastrels
who, intoxicated with the abundant bounty of the opulent region, have
fallen passive victims to the Russian craze for vagrancy. These folk
tramp from hamlet to hamlet in parties of two or three, and, while
purporting to seek employment, merely contemplate that employment
lethargically, express astonishment at the plenitude which it produces,
and then decline to put their hands to toil save when dire necessity
renders it no longer possible to satisfy hunger's pangs through the
expedients of mendicancy and theft. Dull, or cowed, or timid, or
furtive of eye, these folk have lost all sense of the difference
between that which constitutes honesty and that which does not.

The morrow being the Feast of the Assumption, these people have, in the
present instance, gathered from every quarter of the country, for the
reason that they hope to be provided with food and drink without first
being made to earn their entertainment.

For the most part they are Russians from the central provinces,
vagabonds whose faces are blackened, and heads blanched with the
unaccustomed sunshine of the South, but whose bodies are clad merely in
rags tossed and tumbled by the wind. True, the wearers of those rags
declare themselves to be peaceful, respectable citizens whom toil and
life's buffetings have exhausted, and compelled to seek temporary rest
and prayer; yet never does a creaking, groaning, ponderous grain wagon,
with its Cossack driver, pass them by without their according the
latter a humble, obsequious salute as, with straw in mouth, and
omitting, always, to raise his cap, the man glances at them askance and
with contempt, or, more frequently, does not even descry these
tattered, grimy hulks between whom and himself there is absolutely
nothing in common.

Lower even, and more noticeably, more pretentiously, than the rest does
a certain "needy" native of Tula named Konev s