Vanka raised his eyes to the dark window and vividly imagined his grandfather, Konstantin Makarich. The old man was a night-watchman at the house of the Zhivaryovs. He was a small, thin, but unusually lively old man of about sixty-five, with a face that was always laughing and with tipsy eyes. By day he slept in the servants' kitchen or joked with the cooks, and at night, wrapped in a wide sheepskin coat, he walked round the estate and tapped with his mallet. Behind him, with hanging heads, walked two old dogs, Brownie and Eel. This Eel was a black dog with a long body, and he was wonderfully respectful and affectionate. He looked at everyone with the same tender eyes, yet no one ever trusted him, for behind his respect there hid the coldest cruelty. No one knew better how to creep up from behind and bite a leg, or to steal a hen from the larder. More than once his back legs had been broken; twice he had been hanged; every week he was beaten half to death — but he always came back to life. Now, surely, grandfather was standing at the gate. He was screwing up his eyes at the bright red windows of the village church, stamping his felt boots, and joking with the servants. His mallet hung at his belt. He clapped his hands, hunched his shoulders against the frost, and, with an old man's laugh, pinched first the housemaid and then the cook. The whole village lay quiet beneath the snow. The sky was strewn with merrily twinkling stars, and the Milky Way showed as clearly as if it had been washed and rubbed with snow before the holiday.