The day in question was the Friday in Holy Week, and, as night
drew on, drippings were becoming congealed into icicles half an
arshin long, and in the snow-stripped ice of the river only the
dun hue of the wintry clouds was reflected.

As the carpenters worked there kept mournfully, insistently
echoing from the town the coppery note of bells; and at
intervals heads would raise themselves, and blue eyes would gleam
thoughtfully through the same grey fog in which the town lay
enveloped, and an axe uplifted would hover a moment in the air
as though fearing with its descent to cleave the luscious flood
of sound.

Scattered over the spacious river-track were dark pine branches,
projecting obliquely from the ice, to mark paths, open spaces,
and cracks on the surface; and where they reared themselves
aloft, these branches looked like the cramped, distorted arms of
drowning men.

From the river came a whiff of gloom and depression. Covered
over with sodden slush, it stretched with irksome rigidity
towards the misty quarter whence blew a languid, sluggish, damp,
cold wind.

Suddenly the foreman, one Ossip, a cleanly built, upright
little peasant with a neatly curling, silvery beard, ruddy
cheeks, and a flexible neck, a man everywhere and always in
evidence, shouted:

"Look alive there, my hearties!"