“Ivan Makaritch was my benefactor, and I am bound to pray for him day and night, as it is owing to him I have become a good man.”

“My good soul!” a tall old woman, the sister of Ivan Makaritch, said tearfully, “and not a word have we heard about him, poor dear.”

“In the winter he was in service at Omon’s, and this season there was a rumour he was somewhere out of town, in gardens....  He has aged!  In old days he would bring home as much as ten roubles a day in the summer-time, but now things are very quiet everywhere.  The old man frets.”

The women looked at Nikolay’s feet, shod in felt boots, and at his pale face, and said mournfully: 

“You are not one to get on, Nikolay Osipitch; you are not one to get on!  No, indeed!”

And they all made much of Sasha.  She was ten years old, but she was little and very thin, and might have been taken for no more than seven.  Among the other little girls, with their sunburnt faces and roughly cropped hair, dressed in long faded smocks, she with her white little face, with her big dark eyes, with a red ribbon in her hair, looked funny, as though she were some little wild creature that had been caught and brought into the hut.

“She can read, too,” Olga said in her praise, looking tenderly at her daughter.  “Read a little, child!” she said, taking the gospel from the corner.  “You read, and the good Christian people will listen.”

The testament was an old and heavy one in leather binding, with dog’s-eared edges, and it exhaled a smell as though monks had come into the hut.  Sasha raised her eyebrows and began in a loud rhythmic chant: 

“’And the angel of the Lord... appeared unto Joseph, saying unto him:  Rise up, and take the Babe and His mother.’”

“The Babe and His mother,” Olga repeated, and flushed all over with emotion.

“‘And flee into Egypt,... and tarry there until such time as...’”

At the word “tarry” Olga could not refrain from tears.  Looking at her, Marya began to whimper, and after her Ivan Makaritch’s sister.  The old father cleared his throat, and bustled about to find something to give his grand-daughter, but, finding nothing, gave it up with a wave of his hand.  And when the reading was over the neighbours dispersed to their homes, feeling touched and very much pleased with Olga and Sasha.

As it was a holiday, the family spent the whole day at home.  The old woman, whom her husband, her daughters-in-law, her grandchildren all alike called Granny, tried to do everything herself; she heated the stove and set the samovar with her own hands, even waited at the midday meal, and then complained that she was worn out with work.  And all the time she was uneasy for fear someone should eat a piece too much, or that her husband and daughters-in-law would sit idle.  At one time she would hear the tavern-keeper’s geese going at the back of the huts to her kitchen-garden, and she would run out of the hut with a long stick and spend half an hour screaming shrilly by her cabbages, which were as gaunt and scraggy as herself; at another time she fancied that a crow had designs on her chickens, and she rushed to attack it wi th loud words of abuse.  She was cross and grumbling from morning till night.  And often she raised such an outcry that passers-by stopped in the street.