ts are radiant with hope, and
it seems as though all the past is forgotten, all is forgiven.
Mitka, too, has combed his hair, and is dressed in his best. I look
gaily at his protruding ears, and to show that I have nothing against
him, I say:

"You look nice to-day, and if your hair did not stand up so, and
you weren't so poorly dressed, everybody would think that your
mother was not a washerwoman but a lady. Come to me at Easter, we
will play knuckle-bones."

Mitka looks at me mistrustfully, and shakes his fist at me on the
sly.

And the lady I saw yesterday looks lovely. She is wearing a light
blue dress, and a big sparkling brooch in the shape of a horse-shoe.
I admire her, and think that, when I am grown-up, I will certainly
marry a woman like that, but remembering that getting married is
shameful, I leave off thinking about it, and go into the choir where
the deacon is already reading the "hours."

WHITEBROW

A HUNGRY she-wolf got up to go hunting. Her cubs, all three of them,
were sound asleep, huddled in a heap and keeping each other warm.
She licked them and went off.

It was already March, a month of spring, but at night the trees
snapped with the cold, as they do in December, and one could hardly
put one's tongue out without its being nipped. The wolf-mother was
in delicate health and nervous; she started at the slightest sound,
and kept hoping that no one would hurt the little ones at home while
she was away. The smell of the tracks of men and horses, logs, piles
of faggots, and the dark road with horse-dung on it frightened her;
it seemed to her that men were standing behind the trees in the
darkness, and that dogs were howling somewhere beyond the forest.

She was no longer young and her scent had grown feebler, so that
it sometimes happened that she took the track of a fox for that of
a dog, and even at times lost her way, a thing that had never been
in her youth. Owing to the weakness of her health she no longer
hunted calves and big sheep as she had in old days, and kept her
distance now from mares with colts; she fed on nothing but carrion;
fresh meat she tasted very rarely, only in the spring when she would
come upon a hare and take away her young, or make her way into a
peasant's stall where there were lambs.

Some three miles from her lair there stood a winter hut on the
posting road. There lived the keeper Ignat, an old man of seventy,
who was always coughing and talking to himself; at