wife really seized him by the collar of his fur coat and thrown him back on the bed?
No, here he was, already beyond the village. The runners of his sleigh were creaking smoothly over the hard snow. Chalgan had been left behind. The solemn tones of the church bells came floating along his trail, and on the black line of the horizon bands of dark horsemen in tall, pointed hats were sil- houetted against the bright sky. The Yakuts were hurrying to church.
The moon went down, and a small, whitish cloud appeared in the zenith, shining with suffused, phos- phorescent lustre. It gathered size, it broke, it flick- ered, and rays of iridescent light spread swiftly from it in all directions, while the dark, semicircular cloud in the north grew blacker and blacker, more sombre than the forest which Makar was approaching.
The road wound through a dense, low thicket with little hills rising on either hand ; the farther it advanced, the higher grew the trees, until at last the taiga[1] closed about it, mute and pregnant with mys- tery. The naked branches of the larches drooped under their loads of silvery rime. The soft radiance of the Aurora filtered through the tree-tops, and strayed across the frosty earth, unveiling now an icy glade, now the fallen trunk of some giant of the forest half buried in the snow.
Another moment, and again all was sunk in murky
- ↑ Taiga: the Siberian forest.
