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acquaintance of mine, who serves on the Moscow-Kursk Railway as a weigher, in the course of conversation mentioned to me that the men who load the goods on to his scales work for thirty-six hours on end.

Though I had full confidence in the speaker's truthfulness, I was unable to believe him. I thought he was making a mistake, or exaggerating, or that I misunderstood something.

But the weigher narrated the conditions under which this work is done, so exactly that there was no room left for doubt. He told me that there are two hundred and fifty such goods-porters at the Kursk Station in Moscow. They were all divided into gangs of five men, and were on