could never have enough of the jingle and sound of money. He
worked about up and down the Volga, building and fastening nets
in which he caught gold: he bought up grain in the villages,
floated it to Rybinsk on his barges; he plundered, cheated,
sometimes not noticing it, sometimes noticing, and, triumphant,
be openly laughed at by his victims; and in the senselessness of
his thirst for money, he rose to the heights of poetry. But, giving
up so much strength to this hunt after the rouble, he was not greedy
in the narrow sense, and sometimes he even betrayed an inconceivable
but sincere indifference to his property. Once, when the ice was
drifting down the Volga, he stood on the shore, and, seeing that the
ice was breaking his new barge, having crushed it against the bluff
shore, he ejaculated:

"That's it. Again. Crush it! Now, once more! Try!"

"Well, Ignat," asked his friend Mayakin, coming up to him, "the
ice is crushing about ten thousand out of your purse, eh?"

"That's nothing! I'll make another hundred. But look how the
Volga is working! Eh? Fine? She can split the whole world, like
curd, with a knife. Look, look! There you have my 'Boyarinya!'
She floated but once. Well, we'll have mass said for the dead."

The barge was crushed into splinters. Ignat and the godfather,
sitting in the tavern on the shore, drank vodka and looked out of
the window, watching the fragments of the "Boyarinya" drifting
down the river together with the ice.

"Are you sorry for the vessel, Ignat?" asked Mayakin.