l it and it wishes to go
about the woods alive. You have one law and it has another. It is a
pig, but it is no worse than you--it too is God's creature. Ah, dear!
Man is foolish, foolish, foolish!' The old man repeated this several
times and then, letting his head drop, he sat thinking.

Olenin also became thoughtful, and descending from the porch with his
hands behind his back began pacing up and down the yard.

Eroshka, rousing himself, raised his head and began gazing intently at
the moths circling round the flickering flame of the candle and burning
themselves in it.

'Fool, fool!' he said. 'Where are you flying to? Fool, fool!' He rose
and with his thick fingers began to drive away the moths.

'You'll burn, little fool! Fly this way, there's plenty of room.' He
spoke tenderly, trying to catch them delicately by their wings with his
thick fingers and then letting them fly again. 'You are killing
yourself and I am sorry for you!'

He sat a long time chattering and sipping out of the bottle. Olenin
paced up and down the yard. Suddenly he was struck by the sound of
whispering outside the gate. Involuntarily holding his breath, he heard
a woman's laughter, a man's voice, and the sound of a kiss.
Intentionally rustling the grass under his feet he crossed to the
opposite side of the yard, but after a while the wattle fence creaked.
A Cossack in a dark Circassian coat and a white sheepskin cap passed
along the other side of the fence (it was Luke), and a tall woman with
a white kerchief on her head went past Olenin. 'You and I have nothing
to do with one another' was what Maryanka's firm step gave him to
understand. He followed her with his eyes to the porch of the hut, and
he even saw her through the window take off her kerchief and sit down.
And suddenly a feeling of lonely depression and some vague longings and
hopes, and envy of someone or other, overcame the young man's soul.

The last lights had been put out in the huts. The last sounds had died
away in the village. The wattle fences and the cattle gleaming white in
the yards, the roofs of the houses and the stately poplars, all seemed
to be sleeping the labourers' healthy peaceful sleep. Only the
incessant ringing voices of frogs from the damp distance reached the
young man. In the east the stars were growing fewer and fewer and
seemed to be melting in the increasing light, but overhead they were
denser and deeper than before. The old man was dozing with his h