, half dead with terror, crouched down and waved his hands
over his head, as though to ward off a blow; then he leapt up and
ran away as fast as his legs could carry him: as he ran he gave
little skips and kept clasping his hands, and Yakov could see how
his long thin spine wriggled. Some boys, delighted at the incident,
ran after him shouting "Jew! Jew!" Some dogs joined in the chase
barking. Someone burst into a roar of laughter, then gave a whistle;
the dogs barked with even more noise and unanimity. Then a dog must
have bitten Rothschild, as a desperate, sickly scream was heard.

Yakov went for a walk on the grazing ground, then wandered on at
random in the outskirts of the town, while the street boys shouted:

"Here's Bronze! Here's Bronze!"

He came to the river, where the curlews floated in the air uttering
shrill cries and the ducks quacked. The sun was blazing hot, and
there was a glitter from the water, so that it hurt the eyes to
look at it. Yakov walked by a path along the bank and saw a plump,
rosy-cheeked lady come out of the bathing-shed, and thought about
her: "Ugh! you otter!"

Not far from the bathing-shed boys were catching crayfish with bits
of meat; seeing him, they began shouting spitefully, "Bronze!
Bronze!" And then he saw an old spreading willow-tree with a big
hollow in it, and a crow's nest on it. . . . And suddenly there
rose up vividly in Yakov's memory a baby with flaxen hair, and the
willow-tree Marfa had spoken of. Why, that is it, the same willow-tree
--green, still, and sorrowful. . . . How old it has grown, poor
thing!

He sat down under it and began to recall the past. On the other
bank, where now there was the water meadow, in those days there
stood a big birchwood, and yonder on the bare hillside that could
be seen on the horizon an old, old pine forest used to be a bluish
patch in the distance. Big boats used to sail on the river. But now
it was all smooth and unruffled, and on the other bank there stood
now only one birch-tree, youthful and slender like a young lady,
and there was nothing on the river but ducks and geese, and it
didn't look as though there had ever been boats on it. It seemed
as though even the geese were fewer than of old. Yakov shut his
eyes, and in his imagination huge flocks of white geese soared,
meeting one another.

He wondered how it had happened that for the last forty or fifty
years of his life he had never once been to the river, or if he had
b