and looked about, breathing, talking, and smiling with the same
tranquillity; he was giving this day up to pleasure, and enjoying it
to the utmost. 'Just as well-behaved boys walk out on Sundays,'
Shubin whispered in Bersenyev's ear. Shubin himself played the fool a
great deal, ran in front, threw himself into the attitudes of famous
statues, and turned somersaults on the grass; Insarov's tranquillity
did not exactly irritate him, but it spurred him on to playing antics.
'What a fidget you are, Frenchman!' Bersenyev said twice to him.
'Yes, I am French, half French,' Shubin answered, 'and you hold the
happy medium between jest and earnest, as a waiter once said to me.'
The young men turned away from the river and went along a deep and
narrow ravine between two walls of tall golden rye; a bluish shadow
was cast on them from the rye on one side; the flashing sunlight
seemed to glide over the tops of the ears; the larks were singing, the
quails were calling: on all sides was the brilliant green of the
grass; a warm breeze stirred and lifted the leaves and shook the heads
of the flowers. After prolonged wanderings, with rest and chat between
(Shubin had even tried to play leap-frog with a toothless peasant they
met, who did nothing but laugh, whatever the gentlemen might do to
him), the young men reached the 'repulsive little' restaurant: the
waiter almost knocked each of them over, and did really provide them
with a very bad dinner with a sort of Balkan wine, which did not,
however, prevent them from being very jolly, as Shubin had foretold;
he himself was the loudest and the least jolly. He drank to the
health of the incomprehensible but great _Venelin_, the health of the
Bulgarian king Kuma, Huma, or Hroma, who lived somewhere about the
time of Adam.

'In the ninth century,' Insarov corrected him.