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.

She was not affectionate towards the old man, reviling him as a
lazy-bones and a plague. He was not a responsible, reliable peasant, and
perhaps if she had not been continually nagging at him he would not have
worked at all, but would have simply sat on the stove and talked.
He talked to his son at great length about certain enemies of his,
complained of the insults he said he had to put up with every day from
the neighbours, and it was tedious to listen to him.

"Yes," he would say, standing with his arms akimbo, "yes.... A week
after the Exaltation of the Cross I sold my hay willingly at thirty
kopecks a pood.... Well and good.... So you see I was taking the hay
in the morning with a good will; I was interfering with no one. In an
unlucky hour I see the village elder, Antip Syedelnikov, coming out of
the tavern. 'Where are you taking it, you ruffian?' says he, and takes
me by the ear."

Kiryak had a fearful headache after his drinking bout, and was ashamed
to face his brother.

"What vodka does! Ah, my God!" he muttered, shaking his aching head.
"For Christ's sake, forgive me, brother and sister; I'm not happy
myself."

As it was a holiday, they bought a herring at the tavern and made a soup
of the herring's head. At midday they all sat down to drink tea, and
went on drinking it for a long time, till they were all perspiring;
they looked positively swollen from the tea-drinking, and after it began
sipping the broth from the herring's head, all helping themselves out of
one bowl. But the