Such people have nothing left for capital, nothing intact but their hide; it can still serve for something, and it is this last capital that the spendthrift carouser decides to invest. He goes to an entrepreneur and hires himself out to smuggle vodka into the prison; a rich taverner has several such employees. Somewhere outside the prison there exists such a person—a soldier, a tradesman, sometimes even a wench—who, on the entrepreneur’s money and for a certain reward, comparatively rather decent, buys vodka in a pothouse and hides it in a secluded spot where the prisoners go to work. The supplier almost always begins by testing the quality of the vodka and sips some—mercilessly topping it up with water; take it or leave it, the prisoner cannot be too choosy: it is already enough that his money has not been lost altogether and the vodka has been delivered; whatever it is, it is still vodka. The smuggler, pointed out to the supplier beforehand, comes to him from the prison taverner with bulls’ guts. These guts have first been washed out, then filled with water to keep them in their original moist and pliant state, so as to be suitable in due time for holding vodka. Having filled the guts with vodka, the prisoner ties them around himself, as far as possible in the most hidden parts of his body. Naturally, the contrabandist here shows all his adroitness, all his thievish cunning. It is partly a matter of honor: he has to fool both the guards and the sentries. And he does fool them: a guard, often a new recruit, will always be outsmarted by a good thief. Naturally, the guard is studied beforehand; the time and place of work are also taken into consideration. The prisoner, a stove maker, for instance, will climb up on a stove: who is going to see what he’s doing there? The guard is not going to follow after him. Coming to the prison, he keeps a coin in his hand—fifteen or twenty silver kopecks, just in case—and waits for the corporal at the gates. Each prisoner coming back from work is searched and felt all over by the corporal of the guards, who then unlocks the prison gates for him. The vodka smuggler usually counts on his being ashamed to feel too thoroughly in certain places. But sometimes the shrewd corporal gets to those places as well and feels out the vodka. Then there remains one last resort: the smuggler, silently and in secret from the guards, slips the hidden coin into the corporal’s hand. It may happen that by means of this maneuver he passes through safely and brings in the vodka. But sometimes the maneuver does not succeed, and then he has to settle accounts with his last capital, that is, his hide. A report is made to the major, the capital is whipped, and whipped painfully, the vodka is confiscated, and the smuggler takes it all on himself, without betraying the entrepreneur, but, let us note, not because he scorns informing, but solely because informing is not profitable for him: he would be whipped anyway; his only consolation would be that they both got whipped. But he still needs the entrepreneur, though, by prior arrangement, the smuggler does not get a kopeck from him for his whipped back. As for informing in general, it usually flourishes. In prison an informer is not subject to the least humiliation; to be indignant at him is even unthinkable. He is not shunned, people are friends with him, so that if you were to start proving to the prisoners all the vileness of informing, you would meet with complete incomprehension. That inmate from the nobility, depraved and base, with whom I broke all relations, was friends with the major’s orderly Fedka and served him as a spy, and Fedka told the major everything he heard about the prisoners. We all knew it, and it never even occurred to anyone to punish or even reproach the scoundrel.

But I digress. Of course, it happens that vodka is brought in safely; then the entrepreneur receives the delivered guts, pays for them, and begins to calculate. The calculation shows that his goods have already cost him very dearly; and so, for greater gain, he decants it again, diluting it again almost by half with water, and, now quite prepared, awaits a buyer. The next Sunday, and sometimes on a weekday, a buyer appears: he is a prisoner who has worked like an ox for several months and saved a bit of money in order to drink it all up on a prearranged day. The poor toiler has been dreaming about this day long before its arrival, in sleep and in happy reveries over his work, and its charm has kept up his spirits in the dull course of prison life.