's awful! it's awful!"

And how many mortifications the peasants caused us! How many bitter
disappointments in those early days in the spring months, when we
so longed to be happy. My wife built a school. I drew a plan of a
school for sixty boys, and the Zemstvo Board approved of it, but
advised us to build the school at Kurilovka the big village which
was only two miles from us. Moreover, the school at Kurilovka in
which children--from four villages, our Dubetchnya being one of
the number--were taught, was old and too small, and the floor was
scarcely safe to walk upon. At the end of March at Masha's wish,
she was appointed guardian of the Kurilovka school, and at the
beginning of April we three times summoned the village assembly,
and tried to persuade the peasants that their school was old and
overcrowded, and that it was essential to build a new one. A member
of the Zemstvo Board and the Inspector of Peasant Schools came, and
they, too, tried to persuade them. After each meeting the peasants
surrounded us, begging for a bucket of vodka; we were hot in the
crowd; we were soon exhausted, and returned home dissatisfied and
a little ill at ease. In the end the peasants set apart a plot of
ground for the school, and were obliged to bring all the building
material from the town with their own horses. And the very first
Sunday after the spring corn was sown carts set off from Kurilovka
and Dubetchnya to fetch bricks for the foundations. They set off
as soon as it was light, and came back late in the evening; the
peasants were drunk, and said they were worn out.

As ill-luck would have it, the rain and the cold persisted all
through May. The road was in an awful state: it was deep in mud.
The carts usually drove into our yard when they came back from the
town--and what a horrible ordeal it was. A potbellied horse would
appear at the gate, setting its front legs wide apart; it would
stumble forward before coming into the yard; a beam, nine yards
long, wet and slimy-looking, crept in on a waggon. Beside it, muffled
up against the rain, strode a peasant with the skirts of his coat
tucked up in his belt, not looking where he was going, but stepping
through the puddles. Another cart would appear with boards, then a
third with a beam, a fourth . . . and the space before our house
was gradually crowded up with horses, beams, and planks. Men and
women, with their heads muffled and their skirts tucked up, would
stare angrily at o