When all was ready, old Peter arranged a lot of soft fresh hay in the cart for the children to sit in.  Hay is the best thing in the world to sit in when you drive in a jolting Russian cart.  Old Peter put in a tremendous lot, so that the horse could eat some of it while waiting in the village, and yet leave them enough to make them comfortable on the journey back.  Finally, old Peter took a gun that he had spent all the evening before in cleaning, and laid it carefully in the hay.

“What is the gun for?” asked Vanya.

“I am to be a godparent,” said old Peter, “and I want to give him a present.  I could not give him a better present than a gun, for he shall be a forester, and a good shot, and you cannot begin too early.”

Presently Vanya and Maroosia were tucked into the hay, and old Peter climbed in with the plaited reins, and away they went along the narrow forest track, where the wheels followed the ruts and splashed through the deep holes; for the spring was young, and the roads had not yet dried.  Some of the deepest holes had a few pine branches laid in them, but that was the only road-mending that ever was done.  Overhead were the tall firs and silver birches with their little pale round leaves; and somewhere, not far away, a cuckoo was calling, while the murmur of the wild pigeons never stopped for a moment.

They drove on and on through the forest, and at last came out from among the trees into the open country, a broad, flat plain stretching to the river.  Far away they could see the big square sail of a boat, swelled out in the light wind, and they knew that there was the river, on the banks of which stood the village.  They could see a small clump of trees, and, as they came nearer, the pale green cupolas of the white village church rising above the tops of the birches.

Presently they came to a rough wooden bridge, and crossed over a little stream that was on its way to join the big river.

Vanya looked at it.

“Grandfather,” he asked, “when the frost went, which was water first—­the big river or the little river?”

“Why, the little river, of course,” said old Peter.  “It’s always the little streams that wake first in the spring, and running down to the big river make it swell and flood and break up the ice.  It’s always been so ever since the quarrel between the Vazouza and the Volga.”

“What was that?” said Vanya.

“It was like this,” said old Peter.

* * * * *

The Vazouza and the Volga flow for a long way side by side, and then they join and flow together.  And the Vazouza is a little river; but the Volga is the mother of all Russia, and the greatest river in the world.

And the little Vazouza was jealous of the Volga.

“You are big and noisy,” she says to the Volga, “and terribly strong; but as for brains,” says she, “why, I have more brains in a single ripple than you in all that lump of water.”