"Well, you and I have to live in the heat. We have to labor, while they lived at ease. They had nothing to do but to sing and walk about—a very consoling life!"
"They worked, too!"
"It doesn't say so in your stories," observed the stoker with truth, and I suddenly realized clearly that the greater number of the books which I had read hardly ever spoke of the heroes working, or of the hardships they had to encounter.
"Now I am going to sleep for a short time," said Yaakov, and falling back where he lay, he was soon snoring peacefully.
In the autumn, when the shores of the Kama were turning red, the leaves were taking a golden tinge, and the crosswise beams of the sun grew pallid, Yaakov unexpectedly left the boat. The day before, he had said to me:
"The day after to-morrow, you and I, my lad, will be in Perm. We will go to the bath, steam ourselves to our hearts' content, and when we have finished will go together to a Traktir. There is music and it is very pleasant. I like to see them playing on those machines."
But at Sarapulia there came on the boat a stout man with a flabby, womanish face. He was beardless and whiskerless. His long warm cloak, his cap with ear flaps of fox fur, increased his resemblance to a woman. He at once engaged a small table near the kitchen, where it was warmest, asked for tea to be served to him, and began to drink the yellow boiling liquid. As he neither unfastened his coat nor removed his cap, he perspired profusely.
A fine rain fell unweariedly from the autumn mist. It seemed to me that when this man wiped the sweat from his face with his checked handkerchief, the rain fell less, and in proportion as he began to sweat again, it began to rain harder.
Very soon Yaakov appeared, and they began to look at a map together. The passenger drew his finger across it, but Yaakov said:
"What's that? Nothing! I spit upon it!"