Page:Korolenko - Makar's Dream and Other Stories.djvu/266

242 The miller did not pay anything either, but then he thought he was different.

The widow Yankel begged and implored the townsfolk to help her, and even made her children throw themselves at their feet, beseeching them to let her have fifty, or even twenty, copecks on every rouble so that she shouldn't starve, and might somehow manage to take her little orphans to the city. And more than one kind-hearted man was so moved that the tears trickled down his whiskers, and more than one nudged his neighbour and said:

"Haven't you any fear of God in you, neighbour? Didn't you owe the Jew money? Why don't you pay her? Upon my word, you ought to, even if it's only a little."

But the neighbour would only scratch his topknot under his hat and answer:

"Why should I pay him, when with my own hands I took him every penny I owed him the day he went to the city? Would you have me to pay twice? Now with you, neighbour, it's different!"

"Why is it different with me when I did exactly what you did? Yankel came to me just before he went away and begged me to pay him, and I did."

The miller listened to all this, and his heart ached to hear it.

"What a bad lot they are!" he thought. "Goodness knows, they're a bad lot! There's absolutely no fear of God in their hearts. I see from this that