n thick clouds over the low lands and
villages. The snow-peaks were hidden in grey mist. The air was rarefied
and smoky. It was said that abreks had crossed the now shallow river
and were prowling on this side of it. Every night the sun set in a
glowing red blaze. It was the busiest time of the year. The villagers
all swarmed in the melon-fields and the vineyards. The vineyards
thickly overgrown with twining verdure lay in cool, deep shade.
Everywhere between the broad translucent leaves, ripe, heavy, black
clusters peeped out. Along the dusty road from the vineyards the
creaking carts moved slowly, heaped up with black grapes. Clusters of
them, crushed by the wheels, lay in the dirt. Boys and girls in smocks
stained with grape-juice, with grapes in their hands and mouths, ran
after their mothers. On the road you continually came across tattered
labourers with baskets of grapes on their powerful shoulders; Cossack
maidens, veiled with kerchiefs to their eyes, drove bullocks harnessed
to carts laden high with grapes. Soldiers who happened to meet these
carts asked for grapes, and the maidens, clambering up without stopping
their carts, would take an armful of grapes and drop them into the
skirts of the soldiers' coats. In some homesteads they had already
begun pressing the grapes; and the smell of the emptied skins filled
the air. One saw the blood-red troughs in the pent-houses in the yards
and Nogay labourers with their trousers rolled up and their legs
stained with the juice. Grunting pigs gorged themselves with the empty
skins and rolled about in them. The flat roofs of the outhouses were
all spread over with the dark amber clusters drying in the sun. Daws
and magpies crowded round the roofs, picking the seeds and fluttering
from one place to another.

The fruits of the year's labour were being merrily gathered in, and
this year the fruit was unusually fine and plentiful.

In the shady green vineyards amid a sea of vines, laughter, songs,
merriment, and the voices of women were to be heard on all sides, and
glimpses of their bright-coloured garments could be seen.

Just at noon Maryanka was sitting in their vineyard in the shade of a
peach-tree, getting out the family dinner from under an unharnessed
cart. Opposite her, on a spread-out horse-cloth, sat the cornet (who
had returned from the school) washing his hands by pouring water on
them from a little jug. Her little brother, who had just come straight
out of th