Free The village. [Translation from the original Russian text by Isabel Hapgood] by 1870-1953 Ivan Alekseevich Bunin

much attention the cattle alone demanded! After the necessary sheep were slaughtered and salted down, twenty remained to be cared for over the winter. There were six black boar-pigs in the sty, eternally sullen and dis-

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    contented over something or other. In the barns stood three cows, a young bull, and a red calf. In the yard were eleven horses, and in a box-stall stood a grey stallion, a vicious, heavy, full-maned, broad-chested brute—a half-breed, but worth four hundred rubles: his sire had a certificate, and was worth fifteen hundred. And all these required constant and careful oversight. But in his leisure moments Tikhon Hitch was devoured by melancholy and boredom.
    The very sight of Nastasya Petrovna irritated him, and he was constantly urging her to go away for a visit with acquaintances in the town. And at last she made her preparations and went. But after she was gone, somehow, he found things more boresome than ever. After seeing her off, Tikhon Hitch wandered aimlessly over the fields. Along the highway, gun over shoulder, came the chief of the post-office at Ulia-novka, Sakharoff, famed because of his passion for ordering by letter free price-lists—catalogues of guns, seeds, musical instruments—and because of his manner of treating the peasants, which was so savage that they were wont to say: "When you pass in a letter, your hands and feet fairly shake!" Tikhon Hitch went to the edge of the highway to meet him. Elevating his brows, he gazed at the postmaster and said to himself: "A fool of an old man. He slumps along through the mud like an elephant." But he called out, in friendly tones:
    "Been hunting, Anton Markitch?"
    The postmaster halted. Tikhon Hitch approached

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    and gave him a formal greeting. "Had any luck, or not, I say?" he inquired, mockingly.
    "Hunting, indeed! Nothing to hunt!" gloomily replied the postmaster, a huge, round-shouldered man with thick grey hairs protruding from his ears and his nostrils, huge eye-sockets, and deeply sunken eyes— a regular gorilla. "I merely strolled out on account of my haemorrhoids," he said, pronouncing the last word with special care.
    "But bear in mind," retorted Tikhon Hitch with unexpected heat, stretching forth his hand with the fingers outspread, "bear in mind that our countryside has been completely devastated! Not so much as the name of bird or beast is left, sir!"
    "The forests have all been cut down," remarked the postmaster.
    "I should think they had been cut down, forsooth! Shaved off close to the earth!" Tikhon Hitch corroborated him. And all of a sudden he added: " '.lis moulting, sir! Everything is moulting, sir!"
    Why that word broke loose from his tongue, Tikhon Hitch himself did not know, but he felt that, nevertheless, it had not been uttered without reason. "Everything's moulting," he said to himself, "exactly like the cattle after a long, hard winter." And after he had parted from the postmaster he stood long on the" highway, involuntarily gazing about him. The rain had again begun to patter down; a disagreeable, damp wind was blowing. Darkness was descending over the rolling fields—the fields sown with winter-grain,

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    the ploughed fields, the stubble-fields, and the light brown groves of young trees.
    The gloomy sky descended lower and lower over the earth. The roads, flooded by the rain, gleamed with a leaden sheen. The post-train from Moscow, which was an hour and a half late every day, was due at the station. Only from the signal-bells, the humming sounds, the rumbling, and the odour of coal and samovars in the yards, did Tikhon Hitch know that it had arrived and departed, for buildings screened the station from view. The odour of samovars now remained, and that aroused a dim longing for comfort, a warm clean room, a family—or the desire to go away somewhere or other.
    But this feeling was suddenly replaced by amazement. From the bare Ulianovka forest a man emerged and directed his steps