passers-by, as though asking for sympathy; only the sparrows did not
droop, but, pluming their feathers, twittered more vigorously than ever
as they quarrelled among the hedges, or flew up all together from the
dusty road, and hovered in grey clouds over the green hempfields. I was
tormented by thirst. There was no water near: in Kolotovka, as in many
other villages of the steppes, the peasants, having no spring or well,
drink a sort of thin mud out of the pond.... For no one could call that
repulsive beverage water. I wanted to ask for a glass of beer or kvas at
Nikolai Ivanitch's.

It must be confessed that at no time of the year does Kolotovka present
a very cheering spectacle; but it has a particularly depressing effect
when the relentless rays of a dazzling July sun pour down full upon the
brown, tumble-down roofs of the houses and the deep ravine, and the
parched, dusty common over which the thin, long-legged hens are straying
hopelessly, and the remains of the old manor-house, now a hollow, grey
framework of aspenwood, with holes instead of windows, overgrown with
nettles, wormwood, and rank grass, and the pond black, as though charred
and covered with goose feathers, with its edge of half-dried mud, and
its broken-down dyke, near which, on the finely trodden, ash-like earth,
sheep, breathless and gasping with the heat, huddle dejectedly together,
their heads drooping with weary patience, as though waiting for this
insufferable heat to pass at last. With weary steps I drew near Nikolai
Ivanitch's dwelling, arousing in the village children the usual wonder
manifested in a concentrated, meaningless stare, and in the dogs an
indignation expressed in such hoarse and furious barking that it seemed
as if it were tearing their very entrails, and left them breathless and
choking, when suddenly in the tavern doorway there appeared a tall
peasant without a cap, in a frieze cloak, girt about below his waist
with a blue handkerchief. He looked like a house-serf; thick grey hair