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SLEEPER SOFA : the schoolroom. I followed him. "And if they ask you what you sleeper sofa done with it?" he said, turning to me. "I shall tell them I've lost it," I answered carelessly. No more was said about the watch between us that day; but I had the feeling that David not only approved of what I had done but ... was to some extent surprised by it. He really was! V Two days more passed. It happened that no one in the house thought of the watch. My father was taken up with a very serious unpleasantness with one of his clients; he had no attention to spare for me or my watch. I, on the other hand, thought of it without ceasing! Even sleeper sofa approval ... the presumed approval of David did not quite comfort me.
SLEEPER SOFA : He did not show it in any special way: the only thing sleeper sofa said, and that casually, was that he hadn't expected such recklessness of me. Certainly I was a loser by my sacrifice: it was not counter-balanced by the gratification afforded me by my vanity. And what is more, as ill-luck would have it, another schoolfellow of ours, the son of the town doctor, must needs turn up and begin boasting of a new watch, a present from his grandmother, and not even a silver, but a sleeper sofa one.... I could not bear it, at last, and, without a word to anyone, slipped out of the house and proceeded to hunt for the beggar boy to whom I had given my watch. I soon found him; he was playing knucklebones in the churchyard with
SLEEPER SOFA : some other boys. I called him aside--and, breathless and stammering, told sleeper sofa that my family sleeper sofa angry with me for having given away the watch--and that if he would consent to give it back to me I would gladly pay him for it.... To be ready for any emergency, I had brought with me an old-fashioned rouble of the reign of Elizabeth, which represented the whole of my fortune. "But I haven't got it, your watch," answered the boy in an angry and tearful voice; "my father saw it and took it away from me; and he was for thrashing me, too. 'You must have stolen it from somewhere,' he said. 'What fool is going to make you a present of a watch?'" "And who is your father?" "My father? Trofimitch."
SLEEPER SOFA : "But what is he? What's his trade?" "He is an old soldier, a sergeant. And he has no trade at all. He mends old shoes, he re-soles them. That's all his trade. That's what he lives by." "Where do you live? Take me to him." "To be sure I will. You tell my father that you gave me the watch. For he keeps pitching into me, and calling sleeper sofa a thief! And my mother, too. 'Who is it you are taking after,' she says, 'to be a thief?'" I set off with the boy to his home. They lived in a smoky hut in the back-yard of a factory, which had long ago been burnt down and not rebuilt. We found both Trofimitch and his sleeper sofa at home. The discharged
SLEEPER SOFA : sergeant was a tall sleeper sofa man, erect and sinewy, with yellowish grey whiskers, an unshaven chin and a perfect network of wrinkles on his cheeks and forehead. His wife looked older than he. Her red eyes, which looked buried in her unhealthily puffy sleeper sofa kept blinking dejectedly. Some sort of dark rags hung about them by way of clothes. I explained to Trofimitch what I wanted and why I had come. He listened to me in silence without once winking or moving from me his stupid and strained--typically soldierly--eyes. "Whims and fancies!" he brought out at last in a husky, toothless bass. "Is that the way gentlemen behave? And if Petka really did not steal the watch--then I'll give him one for that! To teach him not to play the fool with little gentlemen! And if he did steal it, then I
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