Page:Korolenko - Makar's Dream and Other Stories.djvu/252

228 quite well by myself. It is only a short way. I wouldn't think of troubling you any more."

The devil quivered with rage. He ran round and round on the same spot like a chicken with its head off, and knocked Yankel down with his wing. He was panting like a blacksmith's bellows.

"Well, I never!" the miller thought. "I don't care if it is sin to admire a devil, I do admire this one; he would never let his lawful property slip between his fingers, one can see that!"

Yankel sat up and began to yell with all his might. Even the devil could do nothing to stop him. Every one knows that as long as a Jew has a breath in his body nothing will make him hold his tongue.

"What does it matter, though?" thought the miller, looking round at his empty mill. "My man is either amusing himself with the girls or else lying drunk under a hedge."

A sleepy frog in the mud answered Yankel's pitiful screams with a croak, and a bittern, that foul bird of the night, boomed twice as if from an empty barrel: boo-oo, boo-oo! The moon had finally sunk behind the wood, assured that the Jew was dead and done for; darkness had fallen upon the mill, the dam, and the river, and a white mist had gathered over the pond.

The devil carelessly shook his wings, and lay down again, saying with a laugh: