The sheep were asleep.  Against the grey background of the dawn, already beginning to cover the eastern part of the sky, the silhouettes of sheep that were not asleep could be seen here and there; they stood with drooping heads, thinking.  Their thoughts, tedious and oppressive, called forth by images of nothing but the broad steppe and the sky, the days and the nights, probably weighed upon them themselves, crushing them into apathy; and, standing there as though rooted to the earth, they noticed neither the presence of a stranger nor the uneasiness of the dogs.

The drowsy, stagnant air was full of the monotonous noise inseparable from a summer night on the steppes; the grasshoppers chirruped incessantly; the quails called, and the young nightingales trilled languidly half a mile away in a ravine where a stream flowed and willows grew.

The overseer had halted to ask the shepherds for a light for his pipe.  He lighted it in silence and smoked the whole pipe; then, still without uttering a word, stood with his elbow on the saddle, plunged in thought.  The young shepherd took no notice of him, he still lay gazing at the sky while the old man slowly looked the overseer up and down and then asked: 

“Why, aren’t you Panteley from Makarov’s estate?”

“That’s myself,” answered the overseer.

“To be sure, I see it is.  I didn’t know you—­that is a sign you will be rich.  Where has God brought you from?”

“From the Kovylyevsky fields.”

“That’s a good way.  Are you letting the land on the part-crop system?”

“Part of it.  Some like that, and some we are letting on lease, and some for raising melons and cucumbers.  I have just come from the mill.”

A big shaggy old sheep-dog of a dirty white colour with woolly tufts about its nose and eyes walked three times quietly round the horse, trying to seem unconcerned in the presence of strangers, then all at once dashed suddenly from behind at the overseer with an angry aged growl; the other dogs could not refrain from leaping up too.

“Lie down, you damned brute,” cried the old man, raising himself on his elbow; “blast you, you devil’s creature.”

When the dogs were quiet again, the old man resumed his former attitude and said quietly: 

“It was at Kovyli on Ascension Day that Yefim Zhmenya died.  Don’t speak of it in the dark, it is a sin to mention such people.  He was a wicked old man.  I dare say you have heard.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Yefim Zhmenya, the uncle of Styopka, the blacksmith.  The whole district round knew him.  Aye, he was a cursed old man, he was!  I knew him for sixty years, ever since Tsar Alexander who beat the French was brought from Taganrog to Moscow.  We went together to meet the dead Tsar, and in those days the great highway did not run to Bahmut, but from Esaulovka to Gorodishtche, and where Kovyli is now, there were bustards’ nests—­there was a bustard’s