from time to time from the chimney. Far away beyond the yard the
frogs were croaking and the nightingales singing.

Looking at the factory buildings and the barracks, where the
workpeople were asleep, he thought again what he always thought
when he saw a factory. They may have performances for the workpeople,
magic lanterns, factory doctors, and improvements of all sorts,
but, all the same, the workpeople he had met that day on his way
from the station did not look in any way different from those he
had known long ago in his childhood, before there were factory
performances and improvements. As a doctor accustomed to judging
correctly of chronic complaints, the radical cause of which was
incomprehensible and incurable, he looked upon factories as something
baffling, the cause of which also was obscure and not removable,
and all the improvements in the life of the factory hands he looked
upon not as superfluous, but as comparable with the treatment of
incurable illnesses.

"There is something baffling in it, of course . . ." he thought,
looking at the crimson windows. "Fifteen hundred or two thousand
workpeople are working without rest in unhealthy surroundings,
making bad cotton goods, living on the verge of starvation, and
only waking from this nightmare at rare intervals in the tavern; a
hundred people act as overseers, and the whole life of that hundred
is spent in imposing fines, in abuse, in injustice, and only two
or three so-called owners enjoy the profits, though they don't work
at all, and despise the wretched cotton. But what are the profits,
and how do they enjoy them? Madame Lyalikov and her daughter are
unhappy--it makes one wretched to look at them; the only one who
enjoys her life is Christina Dmitryevna, a stupid, middle-aged