nted sky, at first the ocean
scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for
which it is hard to find a name in human speech.

THE STUDENT

AT first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and
in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound
like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed
at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But
when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew
inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles
of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and
lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.

Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical
academy, returning home from shooting, walked all the time by the path
in the water-side meadow. His fingers were numb and his face was burning
with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on
had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt
ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more
rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy.
The only light was one gleaming in the widows' gardens near the river;
the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all
round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that,
as he went out from the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the
floor in the entry, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the
stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and
the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he
thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the
time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been
just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with
holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same
darkness, the same feeling of oppression--all these had existed, did
exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make
life no better. And he did not want to go home.

The gardens were called the widows' because they were kept by two
widows, mother and daughter. A camp fire was burning brightly with a
crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the ploughed earth.
The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a man's coat, was standing
by and