Page:Tolstoy - Christianity and Patriotism.djvu/61

 And then, as though afraid of wounding a stranger and a visitor by this remark, he added, showing his stumps of teeth in a good-natured smile:

"You'd better Come and work with us, and send the Germans along too. And when we have done work we will have some fun, and take the Germans with us too; they are men just the same."

And saying this, Prokofy took his sinewy arm from between the spokes of the pitchfork on which he was leaning, flung it on his shoulder, and followed the women.

"Oh, le brave homme," the polite Frenchman exclaimed, laughing, and with that ended his diplomatic mission to the Russian people for the time.

The sight of these two men so completely the opposite of each other—the well-nourished Frenchman, radiant with freshness, self-confidence, and eloquence, in his chimney-top hat and a long overcoat of the cut then in fashion, with his white hands that knew nothing of work, vigorously showing how the Germans must be hemmed in—and the shaggy figure of Prokofy, with hay-seed in his hair, shrivelled up with toil, sunburnt, always tired, and, in spite of his rupture, always at work, with his fingers swollen from toil, in his slack homemade breeches and battered bark shoes, striding with a huge fork of hay on his shoulder, with