to the bathing-place," said a washerwoman, placing her wet linen on a drying pole. "I saw him go under, and then he appeared somewhere else, and then he disappeared, and then he came up again once more; and how he shrieked, 'I'm sinking, Batyushka!' and down below he went again, and only bubbles came up after him; and as soon as I saw that a muzhik was drowning I cried out, 'Batyushka, there's a muzhik drowning!'"
And the washerwoman, throwing the yoke-beam over her shoulder, waddled along the narrow path away from the pond.
"It is a sin and a shame!" said Yakov Ivanov, the steward, with a despairing voice; "what a to-do the County Court will make about it ! There will be no end to it!"
At last a muzhik, with a scythe in his hand, forced his way through the crowd of women, children and old men, elbowing each other on the shore, and hanging his scythe on the branch of a cytisus, very deliberately began to pull off his boots.
"Where was it? Where was he drowned?" I kept on asking, wishing to pitch myself in there and do something or other out of the way.
But they only pointed out to me the smooth surface of the pond, which was rarely ruffled by a passing breeze. It was incomprehensible to me how he could have got drowned; the water, as smooth, beautiful, and indifferent as ever, stood above him, glistening like gold in the midday sun, and it seemed to me as if I could do nothing and astonish nobody, especially as I swam but awkwardly; but the muzhik had
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