In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that

They came across like a flood when the traffic light changed, the girls in sweaters with books shelved in their folded arms and the wind fiddling with their hair, the young men in shirtsleeves or field jackets, bareheaded or wearing canvas hats.

It’s true, I open the door, I see them ... they create order . . . order! ... they clear the landing ... and our room ... and the toilet ... everybody out, let’s go! ... down the stairs! nobody left on our floor ... have they come to arrest me ? ... that’s my first idea ...

A boy with a parrot on his shoulder was walking along the railway tracks. His gait was dreamy and he swung a daisy as he went. With each step the boy dragged his toes in the rail bed, as if measuring out 

It’s been two days since the mugging.

The oval face of the mugger rises higher and bobs in what looks like moonlight. Only it’s raining.

Ramani had been to Bandra that day, and he was talking about a bungalow on the seafront. It was one of those old three-storied houses with balconies that ran all the way around, set in the middle of a garden filled with palms and fish ponds.

Dick Donaldson, who in deference to the sundown tradition of the East, was having his first drink of the day, thanked God when he sipped it that this one, unlike all other drinks he had had in Ceylon, was made not with arak, but with real English gin.

Bernstein, the translator, warily climbed the first of the forty-nine steps that led to Misha’s room: he was on the lookout for spiders and rats. He stopped after the twenty-fifth step and removed a lumpy handkerchief from his vest pocket. 

A married man is in love with me. Everyone has something to say. “Again?” Carl says. Carl used to be a heartbreaker, blond and beautiful, but has given it up. This is now: he refuses to walk on the 

One of some two hundred stories by Anton Chekhov that were published originally in periodicals in Russia in the 1880s–1900s but unpublished in English.