'How far, brother, is it still to Svyatoe?'

'What?'

'How far to Svyatoe?'

'Six miles.'

The sun was already setting when at last I got out of the forest and
saw facing me a little village. About twenty homesteads were grouped
close about an old wooden church, with a single green cupola, and tiny
windows, brilliantly red in the evening glow. This was Svyatoe. I drove
into its outskirts. A herd returning homewards overtook my cart, and
with lowing, grunting and bleating moved by us. Young girls and
bustling peasant women came to meet their beasts. Whiteheaded boys with
merry shrieks went in chase of refractory pigs. The dust swirled along
the street in light clouds, flushed crimson as they rose higher in the
air.

I stopped at the house of the village elder, a crafty and clever
'forester,' one of those foresters of whom they say he can see two
yards into the ground. Early next morning, accompanied by the village
elder's son, and another peasant called Yegor, I set off in a little
cart with a pair of peasant's horses, to shoot woodcocks and moorhens.
The forest formed a continuous bluish ring all round the sky-line;
there was reckoned to be two hundred acres, no more, of ploughed land
round Svyatoe; but one had to go some five miles to find good places
for game. The elder's son was called Kondrat. He was a flaxen-haired,
rosy-cheeked young fellow, with a good-natured, peaceable expression of