A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES
fleeting brilliance, and a fresh trembling whisper awakens like the tiny, incessant plash of suddenly-stirred eddies. One does not move—one looks, and no word can tell what peace, what joy, what sweetness reigns in the heart. One looks: the deep, pure blue stirs on one's lips a smile, innocent as itself; like the clouds over the sky, and, as it were, with them, happy memories pass in slow procession over the soul, and still one fancies one's gaze goes deeper and deeper, and draws one with it up into that peaceful, shining immensity, and that one cannot be brought back from that height, that depth. . . .
'Master, master!' cried Kassyan suddenly in his musical voice.
I raised myself in surprise: up till then he had scarcely replied to my questions, and now he suddenly addressed me of himself.
'What is it?' I asked.
'What did you kill the bird for?' he began, looking me straight in the face.
'What for? Corncrake is game; one can eat it.'
'That was not what you killed it for, master, as though you were going to eat it! You killed it for amusement'
'Well, you yourself, I suppose, eat geese or chickens?'
'Those birds are provided by God for man, but the corncrake is a wild bird of the woods: and not he alone; many they are, the wild things of the
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