Page:Korolenko - Makar's Dream and Other Stories.djvu/309

Rh they say. Yankel kept one inn, but the miller keeps two."

"Oh, hang him, he needn't have said that!" thought the miller, miserably. "It would have been ever so much better if he hadn't referred to it."

But the soldier continued:

"When I worked for Yankel, I wore bast shoes, now I wear boots!"

"From where did you get them?"

"From where, eh? Our business is like a well with two buckets. One bucket fills and the other grows empty. One goes up and the other goes down. I used to wear bast shoes; now I wear boots. Opanas used to wear boots; now he goes barefoot because he's a fool. The bucket comes to the wise man full and goes away empty. Now do you understand?"

The devil listened attentively, and said:

"Wait a minute! At last we seem to be getting somewhere!"

"But I've been telling you the same thing all along. If you call Yankel kvass, then the miller is beer; but if you were to give me a glass of good vodka, I should let the beer alone."

The tip of the devil's tail skipped about so madly on the sand that Kharko noticed it at last. He blew a puff of smoke right into the devil's face, and put his foot on the tail as if by accident. The devil jumped, and yelped like a great dog. Both he and Kharko took fright; they opened their eyes wide,