man.

The peasant seated himself on the boards at her feet, clasped his knees
in his hands, lifted his face to her and seriously listened to her
words.

"You must raise your voice, when I lower mine, understand?"

"I understand; but, Madam, you ought to hand me some just to give me
courage!"

"Foma, give him a glass of brandy!"

And when the peasant emptied it, cleared his throat with pleasure,
licked his lips and said: "Now, I can do it," she ordered, knitting her
brow:

"Begin!"

The peasant made a wry mouth, lifted his eyes to her face, and started
in a high-pitched tenor:

"I cannot drink, I cannot eat."

Trembling in every limb, the woman sobbed out tremulously, with strange
sadness:

"Wine cannot gladden my soul."

The peasant smiled sweetly, tossed his head to and fro, and closing his
eyes, poured out into the air a tremulous wave of high-pitched notes:

"Oh, time has come for me to bid goodbye!"

And the woman, shuddering and writhing, moaned and wailed:

"Oi, from my kindred I must part."

Lowering his voice and swaying to and fro, the peasant declaimed in a
sing-song with a remarkably intense expression of anguish:

"Alas, to foreign lands I must depart."

When the two voices, yearning and sobbing, poured forth into the silence
and freshness of the evening, everything about them seemed warmer and
better; everything seemed to smile the sorrowful smile of sympathy on
the anguish of the man whom an obscure power is tearing away from his
native soil into some foreign place, where hard labour and degradation
are in store for him. It seemed as though not the sounds, nor the song,
but the burning tears of the human heart in which the plaint had surged
up--it seemed as though these tears moistened the air. Wild grief and
pain from the sores of body and soul, which were wearied in the struggle
with stern life; intense sufferings from the wounds dealt to man by the
iron hand of want--all this was invested in the simple, crude words and
was tossed in ineffably melancholy sounds toward the distant, empty sky,
which has no echo for anybody or anything.

Foma had stepped aside from the singers, and stared at them with a
feeling akin to fright, and the song, in a huge wave, poured forth
into his breast, and the wild power of grief, with which it had been
invested, clutched his heart painfully. He felt that tears would soon
gush from his breast, something was clogging his throat and his face
was quive