"Set to work, children, set to work!"
One day, carrying out the task which my master had angrily set me, I said to Grigori:
"What bad workmen you have."
He seemed surprised.
"Why?"—
"This work ought to have been finished yesterday, and they won't finish it even to-day."
"That is true;'they won't have time," he agreed, and after a silence he added cautiously:
"Of course, I see that by rights I ought to dismiss them, but you see they are all my own people from my own village. And then again the punishment of God is that every man should eat bread by the sweat of his brow, and the punishment is for all of us—for you and me, too. But you and I labor less than they do, and—well, it would be awkward to dismiss them."
He lived in a dream. He would walk along the deserted streets of the market-place, and suddenly halting on one of the bridges over the Obvodni Canal, would stand for a long time at the railings, looking into the water, at the sky, or into the distance beyond the Oka. If one overtook him and asked:
"What are you doing?"