He was silent for a few instants, and started shouting again. His voice
rang out clear in the still, lightly slumbering air. Thirty times at
least he had called the name, Antropka. When suddenly, from the farthest
end of the plain, as though from another world, there floated a scarcely
audible reply:

'Wha-a-t?'

The boy's voice shouted back at once with gleeful exasperation:

'Come here, devil! woo-od imp!'

'What fo-or?' replied the other, after a long interval.

'Because dad wants to thrash you!' the first voice shouted back
hurriedly.

The second voice did not call back again, and the boy fell to shouting
Antropka once more. His cries, fainter and less and less frequent, still
floated up to my ears, when it had grown completely dark, and I had
turned the corner of the wood which skirts my village and lies over
three miles from Kolotovka.... 'Antropka-a-a!' was still audible in the
air, filled with the shadows of night.




XVIII