mujiks and the landscape, I'll take a
white note.[26] There's painting! It hurts your eye, it's so bright;
just received from the Exchange; varnish hardly dry. Take the
winter-piece. Fifteen rubles! Frame worth the money. There's a winter,
there's snow for you!"

Here the eager trader gave a slight fillip to the canvass, as if he
expected the snow to fall off.

"Take the three. I'll send them home at once. Where does your honour
live? Boy, a cord!"

"Not so fast, my friend," cried the artist, startled from his reverie,
and perceiving the brisk dealer about to tie up the three daubs. His
first impulse was to walk away, but he felt ashamed to purchase nothing
after standing so long before the shop, and causing the hungry-looking
old salesman so large an expenditure of breath. "Wait a little," he
said. "I will see if you have any thing to suit me." And, stooping down,
he turned over a number of battered dusty old pictures heaped like
lumber upon the ground. They were chiefly old-fashioned family
portraits, likenesses of unknown and insignificant faces, with torn
canvass, and frames that had lost their gilding. Nevertheless Tchartkoff
carefully examined them, thinking it possible he might pick up something
good. He had more than once heard stories of pictures of the great
masters being met with amongst the dust and trash of such shops as this.
The dealer, perceiving he had probably nailed a customer, ceased his
bustling importunity, resumed his station at the door, and recommenced
his appeals to the passengers. He shouted, chattered, and pointed to his
wares, but without success; then he had a long chat with an
old-clothesman, whose establishment was on the opposite side of the
alley; and at last, recollecting that, all this time there was a
customer in his shop, he turned his back upon the public and walked in.

"Have you chosen anything, sir?"

The artist stood immoveable before a large portrait, whose frame had
once been richly gilt, although it now scarcely retained a few tarnished
vestiges of its former splendour. The subject was an old man, his face
swarthy and bronzed, with furrowed brow and hollow temples, and sharp
high cheekbones; a physiognomy on which the ravages of time, and
climate, and suffering were plainly legible. The figure was draped in a
flowing Asiatic costume. Defaced and injured and grimed with dirt though
the portrait was, yet, when Tchartkoff had wiped the dust from the
countenance, he percei