sometimes pick it up and drop it again with a smile of delight. The
garret was locked up by means of a padlock that looked like a kalatch or
basket-shaped loaf, only black; the key of this padlock Gerasim always
carried about him in his girdle. He did not like people to come to his
garret.

So passed a year, at the end of which a little incident befell Gerasim.

The old lady, in whose service he lived as porter, adhered in everything
to the ancient ways, and kept a large number of servants. In her house
were not only laundresses, sempstresses, carpenters, tailors and
tailoresses, there was even a harness-maker--he was reckoned as a
veterinary surgeon, too,--and a doctor for the servants; there was a
household doctor for the mistress; there was, lastly, a shoemaker, by
name Kapiton Klimov, a sad drunkard. Klimov regarded himself as an
injured creature, whose merits were unappreciated, a cultivated man from
Petersburg, who ought not to be living in Moscow without occupation--in
the wilds, so to speak; and if he drank, as he himself expressed it
emphatically, with a blow on his chest, it was sorrow drove him to it.
So one day his mistress had a conversation about him with her head
steward, Gavrila, a man whom, judging solely from his little yellow eyes
and nose like a duck's beak, fate itself, it seemed, had marked out as a
person in authority. The lady expressed her regret at the corruption of
the morals of Kapiton, who had, only the evening before, been picked up
somewhere in the street.

"Now, Gavrila," she observed, all of a sudden, "now, if we were to marry
him, what do you think, perhaps he would be steadier?"

"Why not marry him, indeed, 'm? He could be married, 'm," answered