III

On the evening when the village Meeting, in the cold darkness of an October night, was choosing the recruits and vociferating in front of the office, Polikéy sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing down some horse medicine upon the table with a bottle; but what it was, he himself did not know. He had there sublimate of mercury, sulphur, Glauber’s salts, and some kind of herb which he had gathered, having once imagined it to be good for broken wind, and now considered not useless in other disorders. The children had already gone to bed⁠—two on the oven, two on the bed, and one in the cradle beside which Akoulína sat spinning. The remainder of a candle⁠—one of the proprietress’s candles which had not been put away carefully enough⁠—was burning in a wooden candlestick on the windowsill, and Akoulína every now and then got up to snuff it with her fingers, so that her husband should not have to break off his important occupation. There existed independent thinkers who regarded Polikéy as a worthless farrier and a worthless man. Others, the majority, considered him a bad man, but a great master of his art; but Akoulína, though she often scolded and even beat her husband, thought him the first among farriers and the first among men.