the floor, and then sat down and looked at Zhilin, and smiling all over, kept pointing at the pitcher.
"Why is she so delighted?" thought Zhilin. Then he took up the pitcher and began to drink. He thought it was water, but it was milk. He drank all the milk. "Khorosho!"[1] said he. How rejoiced Dina was then!
"Khorosho, Ivan, Khorosho," she repeated, and leaping to her feet, she clapped her hands, snatched up the pitcher, and ran off.
And from thenceforth she, every day, brought him some milk privately. Now the Tatars used to make cheese-cakes out of goats' milk and dried them on their roofs, and these cheese-cakes she also supplied him with secretly. And once, when the master of the house slaughtered a sheep, she brought him a bit of mutton in her sleeve, flung it down before him and ran off.
Occasionally there were heavy storms, and the rain poured down for a whole hour as if out of a bucket, and all the streams grew turbid and overflowed. Where there had been a ford there was then three arshins[2] of water, and the stones were whirled from their places. Streams then flowed everywhere, and there was a distant roar in the mountains. And so when the storm had passed over, the whole village was full of watercourses. After one of these storms Zhilin asked his master to lend him a knife, carved out a little cylinder and a little board, attached a wheel to them, and fastened a puppet at each end of the wheel.
112
