“Nothing like it! There was no approaching him. He was quite mad with drink. He’d spent all he had and hired himself out to a storekeeper to replace his eldest son, and in our part of the country when a man sells himself for a soldier, up to the very day he is taken away, everything in the house has to give way to him, and he is master over all. He gets the sum in full when he goes and till that time he lives in the house; he sometimes stays there for six months and the way he’ll go on, it’s a disgrace to a decent house. ‘I am going for a soldier in place of your son,’ the fellow would say, ‘so I am your benefactor, so you must all respect me, or I’ll refuse.’ So Filka was having a rare time at the shopkeeper’s, sleeping with the daughter, pulling the father’s beard every day after dinner, and doing just as he liked. He had a bath every day and insisted on using vodka for water, and the women carrying him to the bathhouse in their arms. When he came back from a walk he would stand in the middle of the street and say, ‘I won’t go in at the gate, pull down the fence,’ so they had to pull down the fence in another place beside the gate for him to go through. At last his time was up, they got him sober and took him off.