And all at once Nekhludoff remembered how, long ago, when he was young and innocent, he had heard the women’s wooden bats slapping the wet clothes above the rhythmical sound from the mill, and in the same way the spring breeze had blown about the hair on his wet forehead and the papers on the window-sill, which was all cut about with a knife, and just in the same way a fly had buzzed loudly past his car.

It was not exactly that he remembered himself as a lad of 15, but he seemed to feel himself the same as he was then, with the same freshness and purity, and full of the same grand possibilities for the future, and at the same time, as it happens in a dream, he knew that all this could be no more, and he felt terribly sad.  “At what time would you like something to eat?” asked the foreman, with a smile.

“When you like; I am not hungry.  I shall go for a walk through the village.”

“Would you not like to come into the house?  Everything is in order there.  Have the goodness to look in.  If the outside—–­”

“Not now; later on.  Tell me, please, have you got a woman here called Matrona Kharina?” (This was Katusha’s aunt, the village midwife.)

“Oh, yes; in the village she keeps a secret pot-house.  I know she does, and I accuse her of it and scold her; but as to taking her up, it would be a pity.  An old woman, you know; she has grandchildren,” said the foreman, continuing to smile in the same manner, partly wishing to be pleasant to the master, and partly because he was convinced that Nekhludoff understood all these matters just as well as he did himself.

“Where does she live?  I shall go across and see her.”

“At the end of the village; the further side, the third from the end.  To the left there is a brick cottage, and her hut is beyond that.  But I’d better see you there,” the foreman said with a graceful smile.

“No, thanks, I shall find it; and you be so good as to call a meeting of the peasants, and tell them that I want to speak to them about the land,” said Nekhludoff, with the intention of coming to the same agreement with the peasants here as he had done in Kousminski, and, if possible, that same evening.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PEASANTS’ LOT.

When Nekhludoff came out of the gate he met the girl with the long earrings on the well-trodden path that lay across the pasture ground, overgrown with dock and plantain leaves.  She had a long, brightly-coloured apron on, and was quickly swinging her left arm in front of herself as she stepped briskly with her fat, bare feet.  With her right arm she was pressing a fowl to her stomach.  The fowl, with red comb shaking, seemed perfectly calm; he only rolled up his eyes and stretched out and drew in one black leg, clawing the girl’s apron.  When the girl came nearer to “the master,” she began moving more slowly, and her run changed into a walk.