red to go into the kitchen and see what
was there.

VIII

Nikifor was taken to the district hospital, and towards evening he died
there. Lipa did not wait for them to come for her, but wrapped the dead
baby in its little quilt and carried it home.

The hospital, a new one recently built, with big windows, stood high up
on a hill; it was glittering from the setting sun and looked as though
it were on fire from inside. There was a little village below. Lipa went
down along the road, and before reaching the village sat down by a pond.
A woman brought a horse down to drink and the horse did not drink.

"What more do you want?" said the woman to it softly. "What do you
want?"

A boy in a red shirt, sitting at the water's edge, was washing his
father's boots. And not another soul was in sight either in the village
or on the hill.

"It's not drinking," said Lipa, looking at the horse.

Then the woman with the horse and the boy with the boots walked away,
and there was no one left at all. The sun went to bed wrapped in cloth
of gold and purple, and long clouds, red and lilac, stretched across the
sky, guarded its slumbers. Somewhere far away a bittern cried, a
hollow, melancholy sound like a cow shut up in a barn. The cry of that
mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like
or where it lived. At the top of the hill by the hospital, in the bushes
close to the pond, and in the fields the nightingales were trilling.
The cuckoo kept reckoning someone's years and losing count and beginning
again. In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining
themselves to bursting, and one could even make out the words: "That's
what you are! That's what you are!" What a noise there was! It seemed
as though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one
might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs,
might appreciate and enjoy every minute: life is given only once.

A silver half-moon was shining in the sky; there were many stars. Lipa
had no idea how long she sat by the pond, but when she got up and walked
on everybody was asleep in the little village, and there was not a
single light. It was probably about nine miles' walk home, but she had
not the strength, she had not the power to think how to go: the moon
gleamed now in front, now on the right, and the same cuckoo kept calling
in a voice grown husky, with a chuckle as though gibing at her: "Oy,
look out, yo