Vanka Zhukov, a boy of nine, had spent three months working as an apprentice to the shoemaker Master Alyakhin in Moscow. On Christmas Eve the boy tossed on his bed, anxious and troubled, begging for sleep that would not come.
And when dawn broke, and his master went with his family to church to say their prayers, Vanka hurried to the cupboard and took out an inkwell and a holder gripping a rust-crowned pen; he set them on a wooden bench, knelt on his knees beside the bench, then spread a worn sheet of paper upon it and made ready to write.
Before tracing the first word he glanced fearfully at the door and the window, then eyed the saint's image out of the corner of his eye, and ran his gaze over the shelves piled high with boot lasts, drawing his breath in broken gasps.
He began to write: My dear grandfather... Konstantin Makarych. Here I am writing you a letter in which I send you Christmas greetings. I ask God to grant you abundant good and to prolong your life, for no one is left to me but you, now that I have lost my father and my mother.
Vanka turned his gaze to the window, on which the candlelight glimmered, and imagined his grandfather, who works as a night watchman at the house of Mr. Zhivarov, standing before him. This
grandfather of his was a short, thin-bodied man of sixty-five, yet still nimble and lively, a smile never leaving his lips. By day he sleeps in the kitchen or teases the cooks, and by night he wraps himself in his tattered sheepskin and makes the rounds of his master's house, striking the ground with his stick, followed by his two dogs, Kashtanka and Vyun — this last one black, long of body, closely resembling a weasel, sharp-eyed, pampered and well loved, enjoying a good reputation among his masters and strangers alike, though beneath his gentleness and humility he concealed a strange spite and cunning.
None was more skilled than he at slipping in wherever his sense of smell led him, and he was very clever at fastening onto people's legs and stealing chickens from the peasants... How often he was kicked and whipped in punishment for his insolence — some even hanged him by the neck twice — and yet, for all that, Vyun would get up as though nothing had happened to him!
Vanka pictured his grandfather standing, as was his habit, at the gate of the house, directing his gaze at the red-hued windows of the church, hunched into himself from the bitter cold, stamping the ground with his thick boots, rubbing his hands, coughing, joking with the cooks and the maids, pinching their hands in playful mischief; then he takes his snuffbox from his pocket and offers it to them, asking: Would you care for a pinch? The women take a little of the snuff and inhale it, and are soon busy sneezing, while Vanka's grandfather laughs with delight and cries: I'm perishing of frost!
Then he holds the snuff to the nose of the dog Kashtanka, who sneezes, indignant and offended; and he holds it to the nose of the dog Vyun, who deems it courtesy and humility not to sneeze, and contents himself with wagging his tail. The weather just then was beautiful, the air still and moist. And when night comes on and the village sinks into its depths, the houses show with their white roofs, the chimneys sending up smoke in col