“But . . .  I must be going,” he says, remembering that he has no time to spare.  “Good-bye!”

“Where are you off to?”

“I only looked in on you for a minute.  The wall of the cellar has cracked in the girls’ high school, so they asked me to go round at once to look at it.  I must go.”

“H’m. . . .  I have told Varvara to get the samovar,” says Lyashkevsky, surprised.  “Stay a little, we will have some tea; then you shall go.”

Finks obediently puts down his hat on the table and remains to drink tea.  Over their tea Lyashkevsky maintains that the natives are hopelessly ruined, that there is only one thing to do, to take them all indiscriminately and send them under strict escort to hard labour.

“Why, upon my word,” he says, getting hot, “you may ask what does that goose sitting there live upon!  He lets me lodgings in his house for seven roubles a month, and he goes to name-day parties, that’s all that he has to live on, the knave, may the devil take him!  He has neither earnings nor an income.  They are not merely sluggards and wastrels, they are swindlers too, they are continually borrowing money from the town bank, and what do they do with it?  They plunge into some scheme such as sending bulls to Moscow, or building oil presses on a new system; but to send bulls to Moscow or to press oil you want to have a head on your shoulders, and these rascals have pumpkins on theirs!  Of course all their schemes end in smoke . . . .  They waste their money, get into a mess, and then snap their fingers at the bank.  What can you get out of them?  Their houses are mortgaged over and over again, they have no other property—­it’s all been drunk and eaten up long ago.  Nine-tenths of them are swindlers, the scoundrels!  To borrow money and not return it is their rule.  Thanks to them the town bank is going smash!”

“I was at Yegorov’s yesterday,” Finks interrupts the Pole, anxious to change the conversation, “and only fancy, I won six roubles and a half from him at picquet.”

“I believe I still owe you something at picquet,” Lyashkevsky recollects, “I ought to win it back.  Wouldn’t you like one game?”

“Perhaps just one,” Finks assents.  “I must make haste to the high school, you know.”

Lyashkevsky and Finks sit down at the open window and begin a game of picquet.  The native in the blue trousers stretches with relish, and husks of sunflower seeds fall in showers from all over him on to the ground.  At that moment from the gate opposite appears another native with a long beard, wearing a crumpled yellowish-grey cotton coat.  He screws up his eyes affectionately at the blue trousers and shouts: 

“Good-morning, Semyon Nikolaitch, I have the honour to congratulate you on the Thursday.”

“And the same to you, Kapiton Petrovitch!”

“Come to my seat!  It’s cool here!”

The blue trousers, with much sighing and groaning and waddling from side to side like a duck, cross the street.