Page:Tolstoy - Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/192

Tales from Tolstoi lay. The young woman heard the hen cackling, and thought, "I have no time now, I have to get things ready against the feast; I'll come a little later, and fetch the egg away then."

She came in the evening to the shed in the cart-house, plunged in her hand—no egg was there. The young woman asked her mother-in-law and her brother-in-law,

"Have you taken it?"

"No," they said, "we have not taken it."

But Taraska, her younger brother-in-law, said:

"Your cackler has settled down in our neighbour's yard, there has been a great clucking there, and from thence she has flown back again."

The young woman looked and saw her clucker; it was sitting beside the cock on the harness of the horses, and had just closed its eyes, it was going to sleep. She would have liked to have asked it where it had been, but it would not have answered. Then the young woman went to the neighbour's. The old woman of the house came to meet her.

"What do you want, young woman?"

"Why, granny," said she, "my hen has flown over to you; hasn't she laid her egg somewhere there?"

"We have seen nothing at all. We have our own. God has given us what we have, and for a long time our hens have laid well. We gather our own; we want not other people's things. My girl, we don't go seeking eggs in other people's barns."

The young woman was much put out. She was saucy. Her neighbour paid her back in her own coin; and so the women fell a-wrangling. Ivan's 142