shop; a grey, frosty noonday, the pigeons alighting in a noisy flock upon the snow beside the shop of another neighbour who dealt in flour, groats, and bran, crowding together, cooing and flapping their wings, while he and his brother whipped with an oxtail a peg-top spinning on the threshold. Matorin was young, then, and robust, and purplish-red of complexion, with his chin cleanly shaven and sandy side-whiskers cut down to half-length. Now he was poor; he ambled about with the walk of an old man, his greatcoat faded by the sun, and his capacious cap; ambled from shop to shop, from one acquaintance to another, played checkers, lounged in Daeff’s eating-house, drank a little, got tipsy and loquacious: “We are pretty folks: we’ve drunk, and eaten, and paid our score—and off we go, home!” And, on encountering Tikhon Ilitch, he did not immediately recognize him, but would smile woefully and say: “Is that really you, Tisha?”
And Tikhon Ilitch himself had not recognized his own brother when first they met that autumn: “Can that be Kuzma, with whom I roamed for so many years about the fields, the villages, and the bye-lanes?”
(“How old you have grown, brother!”
“I have, a bit.”
“And how early!”
“That’s because I’m a Russian. That happens quickly with us.”)
And, great heavens, how everything had changed since the days when they had been roving peddlers! How dreadfully unlike was the present Tikhon Ilitch to the half-gipsy huckster Tisha, swarthy as a black-beetle, reckless, and merry!
As he lighted his third cigarette, Tikhon Ilitch stared fixedly and questioningly out of the tiny window:
“Can it be like this in other lands?”