Page:Leo Tolstoi - Life Is Worth Living and Other Stories - tr. Adolphus Norraikow (1892).djvu/19

12 wife’s trunk, and five rubles were due him from peasants in the neighborhood.

One morning Simeon went to the village to buy the long-coveted coat, wearing his wife's jacket (which was lined with raw cotton) and over it a woollen kaftan (peasant's outer garment). Cutting a walking-stick from the limb of a tree, and putting a crisp green bill representing three rubles in his pocket, he started on his journey immediately after his breakfast. He thought to himself: "I will receive five rubles from the moujiks [peasants], and, adding my three, I will be able to purchase enough sheepskins to make a coat."

At length the shoemaker arrived at the village, and, calling at the house of one peasant, was informed that he was not in, his wife promising in a week to send the money with her husband. Greatly disappointed, the poor man then visited another house; but the peasant declared that he had no money, though he gave him twenty kopecks for mending his shoes.