"All right! For one night two kopecks; a week, ten kopecks; a month, twenty kopecks; go and take your place, but mind not to take anyone else's, or you will catch it. The people who live here are particular."
The new-comer would ask him, "Can one get tea, bread, and grub? Don't you sell them?"
"I sell only walls and roof, for which I pay the rogue Petounnikoff, the owner of this hole, five roubles a month," Kouvalda would explain in a business-like tone. "People who come to me are not used to luxury, and if you are in the habit of guzzling every day, there's a beershop just opposite. But you'd better get out of that bad habit as soon as possible, you skulker; you are not a gentleman born, then why do you want to eat? You had better eat yourself!"
For these and like speeches, uttered in a pretended severe voice, but always with a laugh in his eyes, and for his attention to his lodgers, Kouvalda was very popular among the outcasts of the town.
It sometimes happened that a former client would come into the doss-house, no longer ragged and down-trodden, but in more or less decent clothes, and with a cheerful face.
"Good-day, your honour; how are you?"
"All right; quite well; what do you want?"
"Don't you recognise me?"
"No, I don't."
"Don't you remember last winter I spent a month with you, when you had a police raid and three were taken up?"