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Probably flattered by its master's attention, the head moved, pushed forward, and there emerged from the shed the whole horse, as decrepit as Lyska, as timid and as crushed, with spindly legs, grey hair, a pinched stomach, and a bony spine. He came out of the shed and stood still, hesitating as though overcome with embarrassment. "Plague take you," Zotov went on.

Zotov grew wrathful and indignant, and the horse and the dog listened. Whether these two dependents understood that they were being reproached for living at his expense, I don't know, but their stomachs looked more pinched than ever, and their whole figures shrivelled up, grew gloomier and more abject than before. . . . Their submissive air exasperated Zotov more than ever.

If a precious dog like you does not care for bread, you can have meat." Zotov grumbled for half an hour, growing more and more irritated. In the end, unable to control the anger that boiled up in him, he jumped up, stamped with his goloshes, and growled out to be heard all over the yard: "I am not obliged to feed you, you loafers! I am not some millionaire for you to eat me out of house and home!

When Lyska, seeing the death of her friend, flew at Ignat, barking shrilly, there was the sound of a third blow that cut short the bark abruptly. Further, Zotov remembers that in his drunken foolishness, seeing the two corpses, he went up to the stand, and put his own forehead ready for a blow. And all that day his eyes were dimmed by a haze, and he could not even see his own fingers.

"If you would just be so kind as to give me a gallon of oats again to-day. . . ." From behind the big tea-chest behind which Mark Ivanitch was sitting came the sound of a deep sigh. "Do be so good," Zotov went on; "never mind tea don't give it me to-day, but let me have some oats. . . . I am ashamed to ask you, I have wearied you with my poverty, but the horse is hungry."

When an hour later the old friends were drinking a glass of vodka, Zotov stood in the middle of the shop and said with enthusiasm: "I have been meaning to go to her for a long time; I will go this very day." "To be sure; rather than hanging about and dying of hunger, you ought to have gone to the farm long ago." "I'll go at once!

Prohor calls the dog, and walks away from the timber-yard with her. The crowd laughs at Hryukin. "I'll make you smart yet!" Otchumyelov threatens him, and wrapping himself in his greatcoat, goes on his way across the square. MIHAIL PETROVITCH ZOTOV, a decrepit and solitary old man of seventy, belonging to the artisan class, was awakened by the cold and the aching in his old limbs.

It was impossible to go to his great-niece Glasha, whom he hardly knew, with these creatures; he did not want to go back and shut them up, and, indeed, he could not shut them up, because the gate was no use. "To die of hunger in the shed," thought Zotov. "Hadn't I really better take them to Ignat?" Ignat's hut stood on the town pasture-ground, a hundred paces from the flagstaff.

Zotov rinsed out his teapot and was about to make his tea, when he found there was not one teaspoonful left in the box. "What an existence!" he grumbled, rolling crumbs of black bread round in his mouth. "It's a dog's life. No tea! And it isn't as though I were a simple peasant: I'm an artisan and a house-owner. The disgrace!" The air was grey, cold, and sullenly still.

They did not notice as they talked how time was passing, and when the shop-boy brought in a big teapot of boiling water, and the friends proceeded to drink tea, the time flew as quickly as a bird. Zotov got warm and felt more cheerful. "I have a favour to ask of you, Mark Ivanitch," he began, after the sixth glass, drumming on the counter with his fingers.