e my sadness. I felt sorry both for her and for myself and for the
Little Russian, who mournfully watched her every time she ran through
the cloud of chaff to the carts. Whether it was envy of her beauty, or
that I was regretting that the girl was not mine, and never would be,
or that I was a stranger to her; or whether I vaguely felt that her rare
beauty was accidental, unnecessary, and, like everything on earth,
of short duration; or whether, perhaps, my sadness was that peculiar
feeling which is excited in man by the contemplation of real beauty, God
only knows.

The three hours of waiting passed unnoticed. It seemed to me that I had
not had time to look properly at Masha when Karpo drove up to the river,
bathed the horse, and began to put it in the shafts. The wet horse
snorted with pleasure and kicked his hoofs against the shafts. Karpo
shouted to it: "Ba--ack!" My grandfather woke up. Masha opened the
creaking gates for us, we got into the chaise and drove out of the yard.
We drove in silence as though we were angry with one another.

When, two or three hours later, Rostov and Nahitchevan appeared in
the distance, Karpo, who had been silent the whole time, looked round
quickly, and said:

"A fine wench, that at the Armenian's."

And he lashed his horses.

II

Another time, after I had become a student, I was traveling by rail to
the south. It was May. At one of the stations, I believe it was between
Byelgorod and Harkov, I got out of the tram to walk about the platform.

The shades of evening were already lying on the station garden, on the
platform, and on the fields; the station screened off the sunset, but on
the topmost clouds of smoke from the engine, which were tinged with rosy
light, one could see the sun had not yet quite vanished.

As I walked up and down the platform I noticed that the greater
number of the passengers were standing or walking near a second-class
compartment, and that they looked as though some celebrated person were
in that compartment. Among the curious whom I met near this compartment
I saw, however, an artillery officer who had been my fellow-traveler, an
intelligent, cordial, and sympathetic fellow--as people mostly are
whom we meet on our travels by chance and with whom we are not long
acquainted.

"What are you looking at there?" I asked.

He made no answer, but only indicated with his eyes a feminine figure.
It was a young girl of seventeen or eighteen, wearing a Russi