Two peasant constables -- one a stubby, black-bearded individual with such exceptionally
short legs that if you looked at him from behind it seemed as though his legs began much
lower down than in other people; the other, long, thin, and straight as a stick, with a
scanty beard of dark reddish colour -- were escorting to the district town a tramp who
refused to remember his name. The first waddled along, looking from side to side,
chewing now a straw, now his own sleeve, slapping himself on the haunches and
humming, and altogether had a careless and frivolous air; the other, in spite of his lean
face and narrow shoulders, looked solid, grave, and substantial; in the lines and
expression of his whole figure he was like the priests among the Old Believers, or the
warriors who are painted on old-fashioned ikons. "For his wisdom God had added to his
forehead" -- that is, he was bald -- which increased the resemblance referred to. The first
was called Andrey Ptaha, the second Nikandr Sapozhnikov.
The man they were escorting did not in the least correspond with the conception everyone
has of a tramp. He was a frail little man, weak and sickly-looking, with small, colourless,
and extremely indefinite features. His eyebrows were scanty, his expression mild and
submissive; he had scarcely a trace of a moustache, though he was over thirty. He walked
along timidly, bent forward, with his hands thrust into his sleeves. The collar of his
shabby cloth overcoat, which did not look like a peasant's, was turned up to the very brim
of his cap, so that only his little red nose ventured to peep out into the light of day. He
spoke in an ingratiating tenor, continually coughing. It was very, very difficult to believe
that he was a tramp concealing his surname. He was more like an unsuccessful priest's
son, stricken by God and reduced to beggary; a clerk discharged for drunkenness; a
merchant's son or nephew who had tried his feeble powers in a theatrical career, and was
now going home to play the last act in the parable of the prodigal son; perhaps, judging
by the dull patience with which he struggled with the hopeless autumn mud, he might
have been a fanatical monk, wandering from one Russian monastery to another,
continually seeking "a peaceful life, free from sin," and not finding it. . . .
The travellers had been a long while on their way, but they seemed to be always on the
same small patch of ground. In front of them there stretched thirty feet of muddy black-
brown mud, behind them the same, and wherever one looked further, an impenetrable
wall of white fog. They went on and on, but the ground remained the same, the wall was
no nearer, and the patch on which they walked seemed still the same patch. They got a
glimpse of a white, clumsy-looking stone, a small ravine, or a bundle of hay dropped by a
passer-by, the brief glimmer of a great muddy puddle, or, suddenly, a shadow with vague
outlines would come into view ahead of them; the nearer they got to it the smaller and
darker it became; nearer still, and there stood up before the wayfarers a slanting
milestone with the number rubbed off, or a wretched birch-tree drenched and bare like a
wayside beggar. The birch-tree would whisper something with what remained of its
yellow leaves, one leaf would break off and float lazily to the ground. . . . And then again
fog, mud, the brown grass at the edges of the road. On the grass hung dingy, unfriendly
tears. They were not the tears of soft joy such as the earth weeps at welcoming the
