to it.

An immense crimson sun came into view surrounded by a faint haze. Broad
streaks of light, still cold, bathing in the dewy grass, lengthening out
with a joyous air as though to prove they were not weary of their task,
began spreading over the earth. The silvery wormwood, the blue flowers
of the pig's onion, the yellow mustard, the corn-flowers--all burst into
gay colours, taking the sunlight for their own smile.

The old shepherd and Sanka parted and stood at the further sides of the
flock. Both stood like posts, without moving, staring at the ground and
thinking. The former was haunted by thoughts of fortune, the latter was
pondering on what had been said in the night; what interested him was
not the fortune itself, which he did not want and could not imagine, but
the fantastic, fairy-tale character of human happiness.

A hundred sheep started and, in some inexplicable panic as at a
signal, dashed away from the flock; and as though the thoughts of the
sheep--tedious and oppressive--had for a moment infected Sanka also, he,
too, dashed aside in the same inexplicable animal panic, but at once he
recovered himself and shouted:

"You crazy creatures! You've gone mad, plague take you!"

When the sun, promising long hours of overwhelming heat, began to bake
the earth, all living things that in the night had moved and uttered
sounds were sunk in drowsiness. The old shepherd and Sanka stood with
their crooks on opposite sides of the flock, stood without stirring,
like fakirs at their prayers, absorbed in thought. They did not heed
each other; each of them was living in his own life. The sheep were
pondering, too.

A MALEFACTOR

AN exceedingly lean little peasant, in a striped hempen shirt and
patched drawers, stands facing the investigating magistrate. His face
overgrown with hair and pitted with smallpox, and his eyes scarcely
visible under thick, overhanging eyebrows have an expression of sullen
moroseness. On his head there is a perfect mop of tangled, unkempt
hair, which gives him an even more spider-like air of moroseness. He is
barefooted.

"Denis Grigoryev!" the magistrate begins. "Come nearer, and answer
my questions. On the seventh of this July the railway watchman, Ivan
Semyonovitch Akinfov, going along the line in the morning, found you at
the hundred-and-forty-first mile engaged in unscrewing a nut by which
the rails are made fast to the sleepers. Here it is, the nut!... With
the aforesaid n