tened attentively, looking at me without blinking, and smiling all the while with pleasure.
"And which country is most the bird's home? Ours or those foreign parts?" he asked.
"Ours, of course. The bird itself is hatched here, and it hatches out its little ones here in its native country, and they only fly off there to escape being frozen."
"It's interesting," said Savka. "Whatever one talks about it is always interesting. Take a bird now, or a man . . . or take this little stone; there's something to learn about all of them. . . . Ah, sir, if I had known you were coming I wouldn't have told a woman to come here this evening. . . . She asked to come to-day."
"Oh, please don't let me be in your way," I said. "I can lie down in the wood. . . ."
"What next! She wouldn't have died if she hadn't come till to-morrow. . . . If only she would sit quiet and listen, but she always wants to be slobbering. . . . You can't have a good talk when she's here."
"Are you expecting Darya?" I asked, after a pause.
"No . . . a new one has asked to come this evening . . . Agafya, the signalman's wife."
Savka said this in his usual passionless, somewhat hollow voice, as though he were talking of tobacco or porridge, while I started with surprise. I knew Agafya. . . . She was quite a young peasant woman of nineteen or twenty, who had been married not more than a year before to a railway signalman, a
