“Queen of Heaven! and what I went through when I was a shopboy in a fish-shop!” Yegor Ivanitch went on, flinging up his arms so that his fox-lined coat fell open. “One would go out to the shop almost before it was light⁠ ⁠… by eight o’clock I was completely frozen, my face was blue, my fingers were stiff so that I could not fasten my buttons nor count the money. One would stand in the cold, turn numb, and think, ‘Lord, I shall have to stand like this right on till evening!’ By dinnertime my stomach was pinched and my heart was aching.⁠ ⁠… Yes! And I was not much better afterwards when I had a shop of my own. The frost was intense and the shop was like a mousetrap with draughts blowing in all directions; the coat I had on was, pardon me, mangy, as thin as paper, threadbare.⁠ ⁠… One would be chilled through and through, half dazed, and turn as cruel as the frost oneself: I would pull one by the ear so that I nearly pulled the ear off; I would smack another on the back of the head; I’d glare at a customer like a ruffian, a wild beast, and be ready to fleece him; and when I got home in the evening and ought to have gone to bed, I’d be ill-humoured and set upon my family, throwing it in their teeth that they were living upon me; I would make a row and carry on so that half a dozen policemen couldn’t have managed me. The frost makes one spiteful and drives one to drink.”

Yegor Ivanitch clasped his hands and went on:

“And when we were taking fish to Moscow in the winter, Holy Mother!” And spluttering as he talked, he began describing the horrors he endured with his shopmen when he was taking fish to Moscow.⁠ ⁠…

“Yes,” sighed the governor, “it is wonderful what a man can endure! You used to take wagonloads of fish to Moscow, Yegor Ivanitch, while I in my time was at the war. I remember one extraordinary instance.⁠ ⁠…”

And the governor described how, during the last Russo-Turkish War, one frosty night the division in which he was had stood in the snow without moving for thirteen hours in a piercing wind; from fear of being observed the division did not light a fire, nor make a sound or a movement; they were forbidden to smoke.⁠ ⁠…