Page:Tolstoy - Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/247

 WHAT MEN LIVE BY.

with his wife and children, once lodged at a muzhik's. He had neither house nor land of his own, and he supported himself and his family by his cobbling. Bread was dear, and work cheap; and what he made by work went in food. The cobbler and his wife had one fur pelisse between them, and that was falling into rags, and in the second year the cobbler resolved to buy a sheep-skin by way of a new pelisse.

By the autumn the cobbler had got together a little money; three paper roubles lay in his old woman's coffer, and besides that there were five roubles twenty-five kopecks due from the muzhiks in the village.

And in the morning the cobbler got him ready to go to the village for his sheep-skin. He put on over his shirt his wadding jacket, which his old woman 197