a chimney; one window keeps watch like a sharp eye over the ravine, and
on winter evenings when it is lighted from within, it is seen far away
in the dim frosty fog, and its twinkling light is the guiding star of
many a peasant on his road. A blue board is nailed up above the door;
this hut is a tavern, called the 'Welcome Resort.' Spirits are sold here
probably no cheaper than the usual price, but it is far more frequented
than any other establishment of the same sort in the neighbourhood. The
explanation of this is to be found in the tavern-keeper, Nikolai
Ivanitch.

Nikolai Ivanitch--once a slender, curly-headed and rosy-cheeked young
fellow, now an excessively stout, grizzled man with a fat face, sly and
good-natured little eyes, and a shiny forehead, with wrinkles like lines
drawn all over it--has lived for more than twenty years in Kolotovka.
Nikolai Ivanitch is a shrewd, acute fellow, like the majority of
tavern-keepers. Though he makes no conspicuous effort to please or to
talk to people, he has the art of attracting and keeping customers, who
find it particularly pleasant to sit at his bar under the placid and
genial, though alert eye, of the phlegmatic host. He has a great deal of
common sense; he thoroughly understands the landowner's conditions of
life, the peasant's, and the tradesman's. He could give sensible advice
on difficult points, but, like a cautious man and an egoist, prefers to
stand aloof, and at most--and that only in the case of his favourite
customers--by remote hints, dropped, as it were, unintentionally, to
lead them into the true way. He is an authority on everything that is of
interest or importance to a Russian; on horses and cattle, on timber,
bricks, and crockery, on woollen stuffs and on leather, on songs and
dances. When he has no customers he is usually sitting like a sack on
the ground before the door of his hut, his thin legs tucked under him,
exchanging a friendly greeting with every passer-by. He has seen a great