a king, a man with a lean, yellow,
black-avised face and a pair of languishing eyes, threw overboard a
polished log as in tones of melting melancholy he chanted:

"Se-em, se-em, shest!"

["Seven, seven, six!" (the depth of water, reckoned in sazheni or
fathoms)]

It was as though he were wailing:

"Seyem, seyem, a yest-NISHEVO"

[Let us eat, let us eat, but to eat there is--nothing]

Meanwhile, the steamer kept turning her stearlet-like [The stearlet is
a fish of the salmon species] prow deliberately and alternately towards
either bank as the barge yawed behind her, and the grey hawser kept
tautening and quivering, and sending out showers of gold and silver
sparkles. Ever and anon, too, the captain on the bridge kept shouting,
hoarsely through a speaking-trumpet:

"About, there!"

Under the stem of the barge a wave ran which, divided into a pair of
white wings, serpentined away towards either bank.

In the meadowed distance peat seemed to be being burnt, and over the
black forest there had gathered an opalescent cloud of smoke which also
suffused the neighbouring marshes.

To the right, the bank of the river towered up into lofty, precipitous,
clayey slopes intersected with ravines wherein aspens and birches found
shelter.

Everything ashore had about it a restful, sultry, deserted look. Even
in the dull blue, torrid sky there was nought save a white-hot sun.

In endless vista were meadows studded with trees--trees sleeping in
lonely isolation, and, in places, surmounted with either the cross of a
rural church which looked like a day star or the sails of a windmill;
while further back from the banks lay the tissue cloths of ripening
crops, with, here and there, a human habitation.

Throughout, the scene was indistinct. Everything in it was calm,
touchingly simple, intimate, intelligible, grateful to the soul. So
much so that as one contemplated the slowly-varying vistas presented by
the loftier bank, the immutable stretches of meadowland, and the green,
timbered dance-rings where the forest approached the river, to gaze at
itself in the watery mirror, and recede again into the peaceful
distance; as one gazed at all this one could not but reflect that
nowhere else could a spot more simply, more kindly, more beautiful be
found, than these peaceful shores of the great river.

Yet already a few shrubs by the river's margin were beginning to
display yellow leaves, though the landscape as a whole was smiling