ds always failed me at the necessary
juncture, and I found myself lying crushed as before under a burdensome
sense of the superfluity of my existence.

Again, if ever I tried to make an entry as to some material which had
been used, Ossip would approach me, and, for instance, say:

"Is it jotted down, eh? Then let me look at it."

And, eyeing the notebook with a frown, he would add vaguely:

"What a nice hand you write!" (He himself could write only in printing
fashion, in the large scriptory characters of the Ecclesiastical
Rubric, not in those of the ordinary kind.)

"For example, that scoop there--what does IT say?"

"It is the word 'Good.'"

"'Good'? But what a slip-knot of a thing! And what are those words
THERE, on THAT line?"

"They say, 'Planks, 1 vershok by 9 arshini, 5.'"

"No, six was the number used."

"No, five."

"Five? Why, the soldier broke one, didn't he?"

"Yes, but never mind--at least it wasn't a plank that was wanted."

"Oh! Well, I may tell you that he took the two pieces to the tavern to
get drink with."

Then, glancing into my face with his cornflower-blue eyes and quiet,
quizzical smile, he would say without the least confusion as he twisted
the ringlets of his beard:

"Put down '6.' And see here, young cockerel. The weather has turned wet
and cold, and the work is hard, and sometimes folk need to have their
spirits cheered and raised with a drop of liquor. So don't you be too
hard upon us, for God won't think the more of you for being strict."

And as he thus talked to me in his slow and kindly, but semi-affected,
fashion--bespattering me, as it were, with wordy sawdust--I would
suddenly grow blind of an eye and silently show him the corrected
figure.

"That's it--that's right. And how fine the figure looks now, as it
squats there like a merchant's buxom, comely dame!"

Then he would be seen triumphantly telling his mates of his success;
then, I would find myself feeling acutely conscious of the fact that
everyone was despising me for my complacence Yes, grown sick beyond
endurance with a yearning for some thing which it could not descry, my
fifteen-year-old heart would dissolve in a flood of mortified tears,
and there would pass through my brain the despondent, aching thought:

"Oh, what a sad, uncomfortable world is this! How should Ossip have
known so well that I should not re-correct the 6 into a 5, or that I
should not tell the contractor that the men have bartered