He turned slowly towards me. His features were large, but his face was open, soft, and expressive as a woman’s. Then he gazed with his mild, dreamy eyes at the copse, at the willows, slowly pulled a whistle out of his pocket, put it in his mouth and whistled the note of a hennightingale. And at once, as though in answer to his call, a landrail called on the opposite bank.

“There’s a nightingale for you …” laughed Savka. “Drag-drag! drag-drag! just like pulling at a hook, and yet I bet he thinks he is singing, too.”

“I like that bird,” I said. “Do you know, when the birds are migrating the landrail does not fly, but runs along the ground? It only flies over the rivers and the sea, but all the rest it does on foot.”

“Upon my word, the dog…” muttered Savka, looking with respect in the direction of the calling landrail.

Knowing how fond Savka was of listening, I told him all I had learned about the landrail from sportsman’s books. From the landrail I passed imperceptibly to the migration of the birds. Savka listened attentively, looking at me without blinking, and smiling all the while with pleasure.

“And which country is most the bird’s home? Ours or those foreign parts?” he asked.

“Ours, of course. The bird itself is hatched here, and it hatches out its little ones here in its native country, and they only fly off there to escape being frozen.”

“It’s interesting,” said Savka. “Whatever one talks about it is always interesting. Take a bird now, or a man…or take this little stone; there’s something to learn about all of them.…Ah, sir, if I had known you were coming I wouldn’t have told a woman to come here this evening. …She asked to come to-day.”

“Oh, please don’t let me be in your way,” I said. “I can lie down in the wood.…”

“What next! She wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t come till tomorrow.… If only she would sit quiet and listen, but she always wants to be slobbering.…You can’t have a good talk when she’s here.”

“Are you expecting Darya?” I asked, after a pause.

“No…a new one has asked to come this evening…Agafya, the signalman’s wife.”

Savka said this in his usual passionless, somewhat hollow voice, as though he were talking of tobacco or porridge, while I started with surprise. I knew Agafya.…She was quite a young peasant woman of nineteen or twenty, who had been married not more than a year before to a railway signalman, a fine young fellow. She lived in the village, and her husband came home there from the line every night.

“Your goings on with the women will lead to trouble, my boy,” said I.

“Well, may be,…”

And after a moment’s thought Savka added:

“I’ve said so to the women; they won’t heed me.…They don’t trouble about it, the silly things!”

Silence followed.…Meanwhile the darkness was growing thicker and thicker, and objects began to lose their contours. The streak behind the hill had completely died away, and the stars were growing brighter and more luminous.…The mournfully monotonous chirping of the grasshoppers, the call of the landrail, and the cry of the quail did not destroy the stillness of the night, but, on the contrary, gave it an added monotony. It seemed as though the soft sounds that enchanted the ear came, not from birds or insects, but from the stars looking down upon us from the sky.…

Savka was the first to break the silence. He slowly turned his eyes from black Kutka and said: