“You look nice to-day, and if your hair did not stand up so, and you weren’t so poorly dressed, everybody would think that your mother was not a washerwoman but a lady.  Come to me at Easter, we will play knuckle-bones.”

Mitka looks at me mistrustfully, and shakes his fist at me on the sly.

And the lady I saw yesterday looks lovely.  She is wearing a light blue dress, and a big sparkling brooch in the shape of a horse-shoe.  I admire her, and think that, when I am grown-up, I will certainly marry a woman like that, but remembering that getting married is shameful, I leave off thinking about it, and go into the choir where the deacon is already reading the “hours.”

WHITEBROW

A hungry she-wolf got up to go hunting.  Her cubs, all three of them, were sound asleep, huddled in a heap and keeping each other warm.  She licked them and went off.

It was already March, a month of spring, but at night the trees snapped with the cold, as they do in December, and one could hardly put one’s tongue out without its being nipped.  The wolf-mother was in delicate health and nervous; she started at the slightest sound, and kept hoping that no one would hurt the little ones at home while she was away.  The smell of the tracks of men and horses, logs, piles of faggots, and the dark road with horse-dung on it frightened her; it seemed to her that men were standing behind the trees in the darkness, and that dogs were howling somewhere beyond the forest.

She was no longer young and her scent had grown feebler, so that it sometimes happened that she took the track of a fox for that of a dog, and even at times lost her way, a thing that had never been in her youth.  Owing to the weakness of her health she no longer hunted calves and big sheep as she had in old days, and kept her distance now from mares with colts; she fed on nothing but carrion; fresh meat she tasted very rarely, only in the spring when she would come upon a hare and take away her young, or make her way into a peasant’s stall where there were lambs.

Some three miles from her lair there stood a winter hut on the posting road.  There lived the keeper Ignat, an old man of seventy, who was always coughing and talking to himself; at night he was usually asleep, and by day he wandered about the forest with a single-barrelled gun, whistling to the hares.  He must have worked among machinery in early days, for before he stood still he always shouted to himself:  “Stop the machine!” and before going on:  “Full speed!” He had a huge black dog of indeterminate breed, called Arapka.  When it ran too far ahead he used to shout to it:  “Reverse action!” Sometimes he used to sing, and as he did so staggered violently, and often fell down (the wolf thought the wind blew him over), and shouted:  “Run off the rails!”