Kazan, and five to the University of Moscow; these were his stipendiaries; but to Petersburg, where he, himself, intended to live, he had no students at his expense, and therefore no one of us knew that, instead of four hundred, he had three thousand rubles income. This became known only later on, but all we knew was that he often disappeared for some time, and two years before the time that he is sitting in Kirsánof's library, with Newton's "Commentaries on the Apocalypse," he returned to Petersburg, entered the philological faculty; before he had been in the department of natural science, and that's all.
But if none of Rakhmétof's Petersburg acquaintances were aware of his family and pecuniary standing, yet all who knew him knew him by two nicknames. One of them we have already used in this story,—"the rigorist"; he accepted it with his usual easy smile of gloomy satisfaction. But when he was called Nikitushka or Lomof, or by the full name, Nikitushka Lomof, he smiled broadly and sweetly, and he had just reason for it, because he was not endowed by nature, but gained by the firmness of his will, the right to this name which is so famous among millions of men. But it thunders with its fame only in a district of a hundred versts in width, running through eight provinces; but to the readers living in the rest of Russia it is necessary to explain what this name meant. Nikitushka Lomof was a river-boatman,[1] who went up and down the Volga twenty years or fifteen years ago; he was a giant of herculean strength; he was more than twenty-six feet high;[2] he was so broad across his chest and shoulders that he weighed fifteen puds (600 pounds avoirdupois). Though he was such a heavy man, he was not stout. To illustrate his strength it is necessary to give only one illustration: he used to receive the wages of four men. Whenever his vessel came to a city and he went to market, or, as it is called in the Volga dialect, the bazaar, the boys' were heard in the most distant corners of the streets, shouting: "Here comes Nikitushka Lomof! here comes Nikitushka Lomof!" and everybody ran into the street which led from the wharf to the bazaar, and crowds of people used to pour out after their favorite hero.
Rakhmétof, from the age of sixteen, when he first came to Petersburg, was, as regards strength, an ordinary lad of
