helter a light buggy or britchka. Meanwhile
Nadezhda called from the veranda to Jonah:

"Do you first go in and dress yourself!"

The elderly lady then unfastened the gates; whereupon a stunted, oldish
muzhik in a red shirt limped into the yard with a foam-flecked steed,
and exclaimed:

"It is caught in two places--at the Savelkin clearing and near the
cemetery!"

Immediately the company pressed around him with groans and
ejaculations, and Gubin alone continued to harness the pony with swift
and dexterous hands--saying to me through his teeth as he did so, and
without looking at anyone:

"That is how those wretched folk ALWAYS defer things until too late."

The next person to present herself at the entrance gates was a
beggar-woman. Screwing up her eyes in a furtive manner, she droned:

"For the sake of Lord Je-e-esus!"

"God will give you alms! God will give you alms!" was Nadezhda's reply
as, turning pale, she flung out her arms in the old woman's direction.
"You see, a terrible thing has happened--our timber lands have caught
fire. You must come again later."

Upon that Peter's bulky form (which had entirely filled the window from
which it had been leaning), disappeared with a jerk, and in its stead
there came into view the figure of a woman. Said she contemptuously:

"See the visitation with which God has tried us, you men of faint
hearts and indolent hands!"

The woman's hair was grey at the temples, and had resting upon it a
silken cap which so kept changing colour in the sunlight as to convey
to one the impression that her head was bonneted with steel, while in
her face, picturesque but dark (seemingly blackened with smoke), there
gleamed two pupil-less blue eyes of a kind which I had never before
beheld.

"Fools," she continued, "how often have I not pointed out to you the
necessity of cutting a wider space between the timber and the cemetery?"

From a furrow above the woman's small but prominent nose, a pair of
heavy brows extended to temples that were silvered over. As she spoke
there fell a strange silence amid which save for the pony's pawing of
the mire no sound mingled with the sarcastic reproaches of the deep,
almost masculine voice.

"That again is the mother-in-law," was my inward reflection.

Gubin finished the harnessing--then said to Jonah in the tone of a
superior addressing a servant:

"Go in and dress yourself, you object!"

Nevertheless, the Birkins drove out of the yard pre