Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/125

Rh of the gate, come to blows with, a neighbour over a turnip, and in spite of her ailing condition give her as sound a leathering as any sturdy peasant could have done.

He had an idea of setting up a school among them, but this led to such a ridiculous fiasco, that he hung his head and felt that it would have been better not to have thought of it. All this perceptibly cooled his zeal for looking after his estate as well as for the judicial and moral duties of his position, in fact for activity generally. He was present at the field labours almost without noticing them; his thoughts were far away, his eyes sought extraneous objects. During the mowing he did not watch the rapid rising and falling of the sixty scythes, and the regular fall of the high grass into long rows beneath them; he looked away at some bend of the river, on the bank of which some red-beaked, red-legged martin was walking—a bird of course, not a man; he watched how the martin having caught a fish held it crossways in his beak, hesitating whether to swallow it or not, and at the same time looked up the river where another martin could be seen who had not yet caught a fish, but was watching intently the martin who had. When the corn was being cut he did not watch how the sheaves were being laid in cocks or ricks or sometimes simply in a heap; he did not care whether they threw the sheaves up and made the cornstacks lazily or vigorously. Screwing up his eyes and gazing upwards at the vast expanse of the sky,