He did not want to sleep. He lay a-thinking—thinking always of one and the same thing, that constituted the end and the aim and the pride and the joy of his life—of how he had made a lot of money, and might make still more money, of how many other people he knew were making and had made money, and how these other people kept on making and would continue to make money, and how he, just like them, might still earn lots and lots of money.
"The oak wood will do for sledge-shafts, they'll make capital beams as they stand; there's quite thirty fathoms of firewood too, per desyatin,"[1] he calculated, thinking of the copse inspected by him in the autumn, and which he was now going to purchase. "I won't give 10,000 for it, all the same, but only 8,000, for something ought to be deducted for t!hat little field. I'll grease the palm of the surveyor with a hundred or a hundred and fifty, he'll measure me the field at about five desyatins. And I can let it afterwards as an eight desyatin field. There's 3,000 profit down on the nail. Never fear, I'll manage it," thought he, fumbling with the tips of his fingers after the memorandum book in his pocket. "And how we managed to lose the turning God only knows. There ought to be a wood and a keeper's hut hereabouts. We ought to be hearing a dog too. Why can't the cussed things bark when they are wanted to bark?" He opened his collar a little and began to listen and look about him. The only thing visible in the dark-
- ↑ A desyatin = 2,400 sq. fathoms.
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