Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/79

Rh comb and turning his head on one side as though listening to something; a sow too was there with her family; poking about in a heap of litter, she ate a chicken in passing and, without noticing it, went on gobbling melon rinds as before. This little yard was shut in by a paling fence beyond which stretched a spacious kitchen garden with cabbages, onions, potatoes, beetroot, and other vegetables. Apple trees and other fruit trees were dotted here and there about the kitchen garden and were covered with nets to protect them from the magpies and sparrows, the latter of which were flitting from place to place in perfect clouds. With the same end in view, several scarecrows had been rigged up on long posts with outstretched arms; one of them was adorned with a cap belonging to the mistress of the house herself. Beyond the kitchen garden there were peasants' huts which, though placed at random and not arranged in straight rows, yet from what Tchitchikov could observe showed the prosperity of their inhabitants, for they were well kept: where the wood on the roof had rotted it had everywhere been replaced by new; the gates were nowhere on the slant, and, in the peasants' covered sheds turned towards him, he noticed in one an almost new cart and in another even two.

'Why, she hasn't such a very little village,' he said, and at once resolved to have a good talk with the lady of the house and to make her closer acquaintance. He glanced through the crack of the door from which her head had appeared and, seeing her