In every cranny of the house there was some one, and from early morning to late at night the whole place quivered with noise and outcry as though it were an old rusty kettle in which something seethed and boiled. In the evening all these people crept from their holes into the courtyard, to the bench that stood by the house door; the cobbler Perfishka played on his harmonica, Savel hummed his songs and Matiza, if she were drunk, sang something very strange, very mournful with words that no one understood, sang and wept bitterly at the same time.
In one corner of the courtyard all the children of the house crowded in a circle round grandfather Jeremy, and begged him:
The old rag picker looked at them with his bleared red eyes, from which tears constantly ran down over his wrinkled cheeks, and then pulling his foxy old cap further over his forehead, began in a thin, quavering voice.
"Once in a land, I don't know where, a heretic child was born of unknown parents, who were punished for their sins by Almighty God with this child...."
Grandfather Jeremy's long, grey beard shook when he opened his black, toothless mouth, his head nodded to and fro and one tear after another rolled over the wrinkles on his cheeks.
"And this heretic child was altogether wicked; he did not believe in Christ the Lord, did not love the mother of God, always went past the church without lifting his cap, would not obey his father and mother."
The children listened to the thin, quavering voice of the old man and looked silently into his face.
The fair-haired Jashka, son of the potman Petrusha, listened and looked more attentively than all the rest. He was a lean, sharp-nosed boy, with a big head on a thin neck. When he ran, his head always rolled from one side to the other as though it would shake loose from his body. His eyes were big and strangely restless. They shifted anxiously over everything as if they were afraid to rest anywhere, and when at last they rested on anything they rolled oddly in their sockets, and gave the lad a sheepish expression. He stood out from the rest also by his delicate bloodless face, and his clean, respectable clothes. Ilya quickly made friends with him, and the very first day of their acquaintance Jashka asked his new playmate with a mysterious air: