and swaying willows, and again entered into
the sea of blustering snow raging from above and below. The wind was
so strong that when it blew from the side and the travellers steered
against it, it tilted the sledges and turned the horses to one side.
Petrushka drove his good mare in front at a brisk trot and kept shouting
lustily. Mukhorty pressed after her.

After travelling so for about ten minutes, Petrushka turned round and
shouted something. Neither Vasili Andreevich nor Nikita could hear
anything because of the wind, but they guessed that they had arrived at
the turning. In fact Petrushka had turned to the right, and now the wind
that had blown from the side blew straight in their faces, and through
the snow they saw something dark on their right. It was the bush at the
turning.

'Well now, God speed you!'

'Thank you, Petrushka!'

'Storms with mist the sky conceal!' shouted Petrushka as he disappeared.

'There's a poet for you!' muttered Vasili Andreevich, pulling at the
reins.

'Yes, a fine lad--a true peasant,' said Nikita.

They drove on.

Nikita, wrapping his coat closely about him and pressing his head down
so close to his shoulders that his short beard covered his throat, sat
silently, trying not to lose the warmth he had obtained while drinking
tea in the house. Before him he saw the straight lines of the
shafts which constantly deceived him into thinking they were on a
well-travelled road, and the horse's swaying crupper with his knotted
tail blown to one side, and farther ahead the high shaft-bow and the
swaying head and neck of the horse with its waving mane. Now and then
he caught sight of a way-sign, so that he knew they were still on a road
and that there was nothing for him to be concerned about.

Vasili Andreevich drove on, leaving it to the horse to keep to the road.
But Mukhorty, though he had had a breathing-space in the village, ran
reluctantly, and seemed now and then to get off the road, so that Vasili
Andreevich had repeatedly to correct him.

'Here's a stake to the right, and another, and here's a third,' Vasili
Andreevich counted, 'and here in front is the forest,' thought he, as he
looked at something dark in front of him. But what had seemed to him a
forest was only a bush. They passed the bush and drove on for another
hundred yards but there was no fourth way-mark nor any forest.

'We must reach the forest soon,' thought Vasili Andreevich, and animated
by the vodka and the