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All that is necessary, in fact, is for us to reflect on the condition of these inhabitants of the country, who have removed to the city in order to earn their bread or their taxes, when they behold, everywhere around them, thousands squandered madly, and hundreds won by the easiest possible means; when they themselves are forced by heavy toil to earn kopeks, and we shall be amazed that all these people should remain working people, and that they do not all of them take to an easier method of getting gain, by trading, peddling, acting as middlemen, begging, vice, rascality, and even robbery.
Semyon, the Vladimir peasant, who had a wife and two children in Moscow, halted also, pulled round the skirt of his kaftan, and got out his purse, and from this slender purse he extracted, after some fumbling, three kopeks, handed it to the old man, and asked for two kopeks in change. The old man exhibited in his hand two three-kopek pieces and one kopek.
It had been arranged that the father should pay his son a monthly allowance of three roubles as pocket money. Fedor Mihailovich frowned, took out of his pocket-book a coupon of two roubles fifty kopeks which he found among the bank-notes, and added to it fifty kopeks in silver out of the loose change in his purse. The boy kept silent, and did not take the money his father proffered him.
Giving money to any one who asks is not doing good; it is a mere civility. If a beggar asks me for five kopeks, or five rubles, or five hundred rubles, I must give it to him as a politeness, nothing more, provided I have it about me. It probably always goes for vodka." "But what is one to do?
That was the last I ever heard of him or of it, and I was forced to conclude that some thirsty soul had been in quest of "tea-money" for vodka. I am still in debt to the Russian government for five kopeks. The last time I arrived in Petersburg, I tried a new plan.
How I used to dislike music, but how useful it is to me now! Her small hand lay on the chest of drawers beside which she was sitting, and she drummed an exercise with her thin fingers. 'How much do you get for a lesson? 'Sometimes a ruble, sometimes fifty kopeks, or sometimes thirty. They are all so kind to me. 'And do your pupils get on well? asked Kasatsky with a slight smile.
Here's what I think, Lázar: to offer the creditors such a proposition as this will they accept from me twenty-five kopeks on the ruble? What do you think? PODKHALYÚZIN. Why, according to my notion, Samsón Sílych, if you're going to pay at the rate of twenty-five kopeks, it would be more decent not to pay at all. BOLSHÓV. Why, really, that's so.
PODKHALYÚZIN. Daddy, why do you favor me? I'm not worth it. I'm not worth it! My poor face would positively crack a mirror. BOLSHÓV. What of your face! Here, I transfer all the property to you; so that afterwards the creditors will be sorry that they didn't take twenty-five kopeks on the ruble. PODKHALYÚZIN. You can bet they'll be sorry, sir!
"If we take Kátka," said the peasant-woman; "we shall spend our last kopéks on her, and there will be nothing left wherewith to buy salt for our porridge." "But we will take her ... and unsalted porridge," replied the peasant-man, her husband. Rothschild is a long way behind that peasant-man! July, 1878. The dark, distressing days have come....
The supposition really was senseless, if we take into consideration that the old man throughout Lent had eaten no butter, and that he had no split wood because he could not possibly pay one ruble and twenty kopeks for it; but it turned out that the old man's senseless jest was an actual fact. The young fellow came to see me in a fine black coat, and shoes for which he had paid eight rubles.
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