But the memory was merciful: Pyotr Yevseyevich remembered that near Urals or in Siberia, as the newspaper said, a powerful factory of complicated threshing machines was started by construction; and at that recollection, Pyotr Yevseyevich lost consciousness.

In the next morning the old roofers would go to work past his windows; a glazier carried his material on his shoulder; and a co-operative cart was transporting beef. Pyotr Yevseyevich sat as if in distress, while he was in fact delighted by the quietness of the State and the manners of working people. There, the meek, silent old man Termorezov entered the consumer's bakery; he daily bought himself a roll for breakfast and left to labour at the barn of Communist Industrial Union, where the ropes were manufactured out of hemp for the needs of peasantry.

A barefoot girl tugged a goat by a string to graze in the backyards. The goat's face with its beard and yellow eyes resembled the devil; it was however permitted to eat grass on the territory, therefore the goat was important too.

«Let the goat be also,» Pyotr Yevseyevich would ponder. «One could reckon it a junior calf.»

The door to the dwelling opened, and a known peasant, Leonid from the village Koz'ma, appeared.

«How do you do, Pyotr Yevseyevich,» Leonid said. «You should have waited yesterday with us, but instead you hurried away to your flat…»

Pyotr Yevseyevich became flustered and afraid.

«But whatever has happened? Eh? Is not all well in the village there? I saw a beggar drop a burning cigarette — did he burn the estate?»

«Well, the village is well and good out of that cigarette… But right after you left, there were two carts coming from the other end, and an old man in a carriage behind them.