f the odorous tavern, and he was satisfied.

On holidays the workers slept until about ten o'clock. Then the staid
and married people dressed themselves in their best clothes and, after
duly scolding the young folks for their indifference to church, went to
hear mass. When they returned from church, they ate pirogs, the
Russian national pastry, and again lay down to sleep until the evening.
The accumulated exhaustion of years had robbed them of their appetites,
and to be able to eat they drank, long and deep, goading on their
feeble stomachs with the biting, burning lash of vodka.

In the evening they amused themselves idly on the street; and those who
had overshoes put them on, even if it was dry, and those who had
umbrellas carried them, even if the sun was shining. Not everybody has
overshoes and an umbrella, but everybody desires in some way, however
small, to appear more important than his neighbor.

Meeting one another they spoke about the factory and the machines, had
their fling against their foreman, conversed and thought only of
matters closely and manifestly connected with their work. Only rarely,
and then but faintly, did solitary sparks of impotent thought glimmer
in the wearisome monotony of their talk. Returning home they quarreled
with their wives, and often beat them, unsparing of their fists. The
young people sat in the taverns, or enjoyed evening parties at one
another's houses, played the accordion, sang vulgar songs devoid of
beauty, danced, talked ribaldry, and drank.

Exhausted with toil, men drank swiftly, and in every heart there awoke
and grew an incomprehensible, sickly irritation. It demanded an
outlet. Clutching tenaciously at every pretext for unloading
themselves of this disquieting sensation, they fell on one another for
mere trifles, with the spiteful ferocity of beasts, breaking into
bloody quarrels which sometimes ended in serious injury and on rare
occasions even in murder.

This lurking malice steadily increased, inveterate as the incurable
weariness in their muscles. They were born with this disease of the
soul inherited from their fathers. Like a black shadow it accompanied
them to their graves, spurring on their lives to crime, hideous in its
aimless cruelty and brutality.

On holidays the young people came home late at night, dirty and dusty,
their clothes torn, their faces bruised, boasting maliciously of the
blows they had struck their companions, or the insults