In that Koz'ma village there lived twenty-four homesteads. The huts were built on the slopes of a functional ravine and have suffered this condition for seventy years. Beside the ravine, the village suffered from thirst; due to thirst people ate poorly and did not procreate properly. There was no fresh and quenching water in Koz'ma: there was a small pond amidst the village, at the bottom of the ravine, but this pond was hedged by a dam made from manure, while the water flew there from under the dwellings and places of farming necessity. All manure and the dead remnants of human life were washed down to the hollow of the pond and were settled into a yellowish-brown viscous soup that could not serve as a quenching liquid. During the common epidemics among citizens, namely cholera, typhus or a poor wheat harvest due to the local soil containing few of the bountiful good, the people of Koz'ma would lie down on warm stoves and came to their end, gazing at flies and cockroaches with their eyes. In the old times, they say, Koz'ma had almost a hundred homesteads, but now there are no traces of the past thickness of population. Vegetative shrubbery covered the spots previously populated by the now desolate villas, and there were neither ashes nor brick or limestone spots under that shrubbery. Pyotr Yevseyevich had already dug through that place, for he did not believe that the State could shrink; he felt the multiplying strength of order and sociality, everywhere he observed the automatic growth of the State-born happiness.

The peasants who lived in Koz'ma respected Pyotr Yevseyevich for giving them hope and correctly deemed that the whole Republic should know their need of drinking water, while Pyotr Yevseyevich would support them in that opinion:

«You will be provided with drinking,» he would promise. «It's the State after all. The justice occurs automatically, not to mention drinking water! It is not any kind of dermal disease, is it? No, it is an internal affair: each citizen needs water as much as the mind!»