mpled all the cabbages, the damned brutes! I'd cut your
throats, thrice accursed plagues! Bad luck to you!"

She saw the little girls, flung down the stick and picked up a switch,
and, seizing Sasha by the neck with her fingers, thin and hard as the
gnarled branches of a tree, began whipping her. Sasha cried with pain
and terror, while the gander, waddling and stretching his neck, went up
to the old woman and hissed at her, and when he went back to his flock
all the geese greeted him approvingly with "Ga-ga-ga!" Then Granny
proceeded to whip Motka, and in this Motka's smock was torn again.
Feeling in despair, and crying loudly, Sasha went to the hut to
complain. Motka followed her; she, too, was crying on a deeper note,
without wiping her tears, and her face was as wet as though it had been
dipped in water.

"Holy Saints!" cried Olga, aghast, as the two came into the hut. "Queen
of Heaven!"

Sasha began telling her story, while at the same time Granny walked in
with a storm of shrill cries and abuse; then Fyokla flew into a rage,
and there was an uproar in the hut.

"Never mind, never mind!" Olga, pale and upset, tried to comfort them,
stroking Sasha's head. "She is your grandmother; it's a sin to be angry
with her. Never mind, my child."

Nikolay, who was worn out already by the everlasting hubbub, hunger,
stifling fumes, filth, who hated and despised the poverty, who was
ashamed for his wife and daughter to see his father and mother,
swung his legs off the stove and said in an irritable, tearful voice,
addressing his mother:

"You must not beat her! You have no right to beat he r!"

"You lie rotting on the stove, you wretched creature!" Fyokla shouted at
him spitefully. "The devil brought you all on us, eating us out of house
and home."

Sasha and Motka and all the little girls in the hut huddled on the stove
in the corner behind Nikolay's back, and from that refuge listened
in silent terror, and the beating of their little hearts could be
distinctly heard. Whenever there is someone in a family who has long
been ill, and hopelessly ill, there come painful moments when all
timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death; and
only the children fear the death of someone near them, and always feel
horrified at the thought of it. And now the children, with bated breath,
with a mournful look on their faces, gazed at Nikolay and thought that
he was soon to die; and they wanted to cry and to say