y began to dance. At once such enchanting music sounded over
their heads that Betushka's heart went one-two with the dancing. The
musicians sat on the branches of the birch trees. They were clad in
little frock coats, black and gray and many-colored. It was a
carefully chosen orchestra that had gathered at the bidding of the
beautiful maiden: larks, nightingales, finches, linnets, thrushes,
blackbirds, and showy mocking-birds.

Betushka's cheeks burned, her eyes shone. She forgot her spinning, she
forgot her goats. All she could do was gaze at her partner who was
moving with such grace and lightness that the grass didn't seem to
bend under her slender feet.

They danced from noon till sundown and yet Betushka wasn't the least
bit tired. Then they stopped dancing, the music ceased, and the maiden
disappeared as suddenly as she had come.

Betushka looked around. The sun was sinking behind the wood. She put
her hands to the unspun flax on her head and remembered the spindle
that was lying unfilled on the grass. She took down the flax and laid
it with the spindle in the little basket. Then she called the goats
and started home.

She reproached herself bitterly that she had allowed the beautiful
maiden to beguile her and she told herself that another time she would
not listen to her. She was so quiet that the little goats, missing her
merry song, looked around to see whether it was really their own
little shepherdess who was following them. Her mother, too, wondered
why she didn't sing and questioned her.

"Are you sick, Betushka?"

"No, dear mother, I'm not sick, but I've been singing too much and my
throat is dry."

She knew that her mother did not reel the yarn at once, so she hid the
spindle and the unspun flax, hoping to make up tomorrow what she had
not done today. She did not tell her mother one word about the
beautiful maiden.

The next day she felt cheerful again and as she drove the goats to
pasture she sang merrily. At the birch wood she sat down to her
spinning, singing all the while, for with a song on the lips work
falls from the hands more easily.

Noonday came. Betushka gave a bit of bread to each of the goats and
ran off to the woods for her berries. Then she ate her luncheon.

"Ah, my little goats," she sighed, as she brushed up the crumbs for
the birds, "I mustn't dance today."

"Why mustn't you dance today?" a sweet voice asked, and there stood
the beautiful maiden as though she had fallen