Such were the ideas that came into my mind, some years ago, when,
standing on the steps of a little inn on the bank of the marshy little
river Ressetta, I first gazed upon the forest. The bluish masses of
fir-forest lay in long, continuous ridges before me; here and there was
the green patch of a small birch-copse; the whole sky-line was hugged
by the pine-wood; nowhere was there the white gleam of a church, nor
bright stretches of meadow--it was all trees and trees, everywhere the
ragged edge of the tree-tops, and a delicate dim mist, the eternal mist
of the forest, hung over them in the distance. It was not indolent
repose this immobility of life suggested; no--the absence of life,
something dead, even in its grandeur, was what came to me from every
side of the horizon. I remember big white clouds were swimming by,
slowly and very high up, and the hot summer day lay motionless upon the
silent earth. The reddish water of the stream glided without a splash
among the thick reeds: at its bottom could be dimly discerned round
cushions of pointed moss, and its banks sank away in the swampy mud,
and sharply reappeared again in white hillocks of fine crumbling sand.
Close by the little inn ran the trodden highroad.

On this road, just opposite the steps, stood a cart, loaded with boxes
and hampers. Its owner, a thin pedlar with a hawk nose and mouse-like
eyes, bent and lame, was putting in it his little nag, lame like
himself. He was a gingerbread-seller, who was making his way to the
fair at Karatchev. Suddenly several people appeared on the road, others
straggled after them ... at last, quite a crowd came trudging into
sight; all of them had sticks in their hands and satchels on their
shoulders. From their fatigued yet swinging gait, and from their
sun-burnt faces, one could see they had come from a long distance. They
were leatherworkers and diggers coming back from working for hire.