A boy in a red shirt, sitting at the water’s edge, was washing his father’s boots.  And not another soul was in sight either in the village or on the hill.

“It’s not drinking,” said Lipa, looking at the horse.

Then the woman with the horse and the boy with the boots walked away, and there was no one left at all.  The sun went to bed wrapped in cloth of gold and purple, and long clouds, red and lilac, stretched across the sky, guarded its slumbers.  Somewhere far away a bittern cried, a hollow, melancholy sound like a cow shut up in a barn.  The cry of that mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like or where it lived.  At the top of the hill by the hospital, in the bushes close to the pond, and in the fields the nightingales were trilling.  The cuckoo kept reckoning someone’s years and losing count and beginning again.  In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining themselves to bursting, and one could even make out the words:  “That’s what you are!  That’s what you are!” What a noise there was!  It seemed as though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs, might appreciate and enjoy every minute:  life is given only once.

A silver half-moon was shining in the sky; there were many stars.  Lipa had no idea how long she sat by the pond, but when she got up and walked on everybody was asleep in the little village, and there was not a single light.  It was probably about nine miles’ walk home, but she had not the strength, she had not the power to think how to go:  the moon gleamed now in front, now on the right, and the same cuckoo kept calling in a voice grown husky, with a chuckle as though gibing at her:  “Oy, look out, you’ll lose your way!” Lipa walked rapidly; she lost the kerchief from her head... she looked at the sky and wondered where her baby’s soul was now:  was it following her, or floating aloft yonder among the stars and thinking nothing now of his mother?  Oh, how lonely it was in the open country at night, in the midst of that singing when one cannot sing oneself; in the midst of the incessant cries of joy when one cannot oneself be joyful, when the moon, which cares not whether it is spring or winter, whether men are alive or dead, looks down as lonely, too....  When there is grief in the heart it is hard to be without people.  If only her mother, Praskovya, had been with her, or Crutch, or the cook, or some peasant!

“Boo-oo!” cried the bittern.  “Boo-oo!”

And suddenly she heard clearly the sound of human speech:  “Put the horses in, Vavila!”

By the wayside a camp fire was burning ahead of her:  the flames had died down, there were only red embers.  She could hear the horses munching.  In the darkness she could see the outlines of two carts, one with a barrel, the other, a lower one with sacks in it, and the figures of two men; one was leading a horse to put it into the shafts, the other was standing motionless by the fire with his hands behind his back.  A dog growled by the carts.  The one who was leading the horse stopped and said: