The children, Grisha, Anya, Alyosha, and Sonya, as well as Andrey, the son of a cook, stay up late, taking advantage of the adults' being absent, and play lotto.

His younger sister Anya is an equally avid and smart player, but the kopecks hold no interest for her, it is the excitement of the game that she is after.

The game, marred with all sorts of incidents, but full of excitement, attract even the oldest brother, Vasya, a teenage gymnasium student, even if a suspicious servant refuses to break his ruble into kopecks.

After an eventful and, in the long run, successful search, the children return to the table where they find Sonya fast asleep.

According to Mikhail Chekhov, "[Mayevsky] had charming children, Anya, Sonya and Alyosha, whom my brother Anton Pavlovich befriended and later portrayed in the short story 'Children'.

During its author's lifetime, the story was translated into Bulgarian, Hungarian, Danish, German, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian and Czech languages.