Several times that night I woke in terror at the thought that I might be oversleeping myself, and by six o’clock was out of bed, although the dawn was hardly peeping in at the window. I put on my clothes and boots (all of which were lying tumbled and unbrushed beside the bed, since Nicola, of course had not been in yet to tidy them up), and, without a prayer said or my face washed, emerged, for the first time in my life, into the street ALONE.

Over the way, behind the green roof of a large building, the dim, cold dawn was beginning to blush red. The keen frost of the spring morning which had stiffened¹ the pools and mud and made them crackle under my feet now nipped my face and hands also. Not a cab was to be seen, though I had counted upon one to make the journey out and home the quicker. Only a file of waggons² was rumbling³ along the Arbat Prospect⁴, and a couple of bricklayers talking noisily together as they strode along the pavement. However, after walking a verst or so I began to meet men and women taking baskets to market or going with empty barrels to fetch the day’s water supply; until at length, at the cross streets near the Arbat Gate, where a pieman had set up his stall and a baker⁶ was just opening his shop, I espied⁷ an old cabman shaking himself after indulging in a nap on the box of his be- scratched old blue-painted, hobble-de-hoy wreck⁸ of a drozhki. He seemed barely awake as he asked twenty copecks as the fare to the monastery⁹ and back, but came to himself a moment afterwards, just as I was about to get in, and, touching¹⁰ up his horse with the spare end of the reins

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