feet, shod in bast shoes, and gazing gloomily at them.

At the end of the corridor was a little door leading to the apartment
where the census-takers were. This was the chamber of the mistress
of the whole of No. 30; she rented the entire apartment from Ivan
Feodovitch, and let it out again to lodgers and as night-quarters.
In her tiny room, under the tinsel images, sat the student census-
taker with his charts; and, in his quality of investigator, he had
just thoroughly interrogated a peasant wearing a shirt and a vest.
This latter was a friend of the landlady, and had been answering
questions for her. The landlady herself, an elderly woman, was there
also, and two of her curious tenants. When I entered, the room was
already packed full. I pushed my way to the table. I exchanged
greetings with the student, and he proceeded with his inquiries. And
I began to look about me, and to interrogate the inhabitants of these
quarters for my own purpose.

It turned out, that in this first set of lodgings, I found not a
single person upon whom I could pour out my benevolence. The
landlady, in spite of the fact that the poverty, smallness and dirt
of these quarters struck me after the palatial house in which I
dwell, lived in comfort, compared with many of the poor inhabitants
of the city, and in comparison with the poverty in the country, with
which I was thoroughly familiar, she lived luxuriously. She had a
feather-bed, a quilted coverlet, a samovar, a fur cloak, and a
dresser with crockery. The landlady's friend had the same
comfortable appearance. He had a watch and a chain. Her lodgers
were not so well off, but there was not one of them who was in need
of immediate assistance: the woman who was washing linen in a tub,
and who had been abandoned by her husband and had children, an aged