Choop could not help feeling inwardly pleased at seeing at his feet the blacksmith, the very same blacksmith who would not concede a step to any one in the village, and who bent copper coins between his fingers, as if they were so many buckwheat fritters. To make himself still more important, Choop took the scourge, gave three strokes with it upon the blacksmith's back, and then said: "Well, that will do! Stand up! Attend to men older than thyself. I forget all that has taken place between us. Now, speak out, what dost thou want?" "Father, let me have Oxana!" Choop remained thinking for a while; he looked at the cap--he looked at the belt; the cap was beautiful--the belt not less so; he remembered the bad faith of Solokha, and said, in a resolute voice, "Well, send me thy marriage brokers." "Ah!" shrieked Oxana, stepping across the threshold; and she stared at him, with a look of joy and astonishment. "Look at the boots I have brought thee!" said Vakoola; "they are the very boots which the Czarina wears." "No, no, I do not want the boots!" said Oxana, and she waved her hands, never taking her eyes off him; "it will do without the boots." She could speak no more, and her face turned all crimson. The blacksmith came nearer, and took her hand. The belle cast down her eyes. Never yet had she been so marvellously handsome; the exulting blacksmith gently stole a kiss, and her face flushed still redder, and she looked still prettier. * * * * * As the late archbishop happened to pass on a journey through Dikanka, he greatly commended the spot on which that village stands, and driving down the street, stopped his carriage before a new cottage. "Whose cottage is this, so highly painted?" asked his Eminence of a handsome woman who was standing before the gate, with an infant in her arms. "It is the blacksmith Vakoola's cottage!" answered Oxana, for she it was, making him a deep curtesy. "Very good painting, indeed! Capital painting!" said the Right Eminent, looking at the door and the windows. And, in truth, every window was surrounded by a stripe of red paint; and the door was painted all over with Cossacks on horseback, with pipes in their mouths. But the archbishop bestowed still more praises on Vakoola, when he was made acquainted with the blacksmith's having performed public penance, and with his having painted, at his own expense, the whole of the church choir, green, with red flowers running over it. But Vakoola had done still more: he had painted the devil in hell, upon the wall which is to your left when you step into the church. This devil had such an odious face that no one could refrain from spitting, as they passed by. The women, as soon as their children began to cry, brought them to this picture and said, "Look! is he not an odious creature?" and the children stopped their tears, looked sideways at the picture, and clung more closely to their mother's bosom.