king
after him, winked sarcastically.

"Landowners, too-oo!" he said. "They have built a house and set up
horses, but I bet they are nobodies--landowners, too-oo."

Kozov for some reason took a dislike from the first to the new house,
to the white horses, and to the handsome, well-fed coachman. Kozov was
a solitary man, a widower; he had a dreary life (he was prevented from
working by a disease which he sometimes called a rupture and sometimes
worms) he was maintained by his son, who worked at a confectioner's
in Harkov and sent him money; and from early morning till evening he
sauntered at leisure about the river or about the village; if he saw,
for instance, a peasant carting a log, or fishing, he would say: "That
log's dry wood--it is rotten," or, "They won't bite in weather like
this." In times of drought he would declare that there would not be a
drop of rain till the frost came; and when the rains came he would say
that everything would rot in the fields, that everything was ruined. And
as he said these things he would wink as though he knew something.

At the New Villa they burned Bengal lights and sent up fireworks in the
evenings, and a sailing-boat with red lanterns floated by Obrutchanovo.
One morning the engineer's wife, Elena Ivanovna, and her little daughter
drove to the village in a carriage with yellow wheels and a pair of dark
bay ponies; both mother and daughter were wearing broad-brimmed straw
hats, bent down over their ears.

This was exactly at the time when they were carting manure, and the
blacksmith Rodion, a tall, gaunt old man, bareheaded and barefooted,
was standing near his dirty and repulsive-looking cart and, flustered,
looked at the ponies, and it was evident by his face that he had never
seen such little horses before.

"The Kutcherov lady has come!" was whispered around. "Look, the
Kutcherov lady has come!"

Elena Ivanovna looked at the huts as though she were selecting one, and
then stopped at the very poorest, at the windows of which there were so
many children's heads--flaxen, red, and dark. Stepanida, Rodion's wife,
a stout woman, came running out of the hut; her kerchief slipped off
her grey head; she looked at the carriage facing the sun, and her face
smiled and wrinkled up as though she were blind.

"This is for your children," said Elena Ivanovna, and she gave her three
roubles.

Stepanida suddenly burst into tears and bowed down to the ground.
Rodion, too, flopped to t