As compared with the stories of Garshin, with their “terrible, incoherent cries of woe,” Korolenko’s tales are idyllic. A rhythmical, lyrical measure beats enchantingly in his nature passages, whose intimacy with the life of the woods inevitably recalls the French Theuriet. “The Forest Whispers,” one of his longer short-stories, is simply redolent of tree-fragrance. We feel the wandering airs of the glades; we hear the never-ceasing swish of majestic boughs; we stand rapt in the cathedral silences of the green-shadowy aisles. The peasant tale is the thread on which these pearls are strung, but the pearls hide the string. Listen to this passage. What Loti has evoked from the inscrutable sea, Korolenko has charmed from the forest with his enchanter’s wand. In the forest there was always a murmur, regular, continuous, like the faint echo of a distant peal of bells; soft and indistinct, like a song without words, or like the confused recollection of bygone days. The murmur never ceased by day or night, for it was an old dense forest of pines that had never been touched by woodman’s saw or axe. Lofty pines, a hundred years old, with their red, sturdy trunks, stood in close array, waving, in response to each breath of wind, their high-tufted tops. Below, all was quiet; the air was filled with an odor of tar; through the thick layer of pine-cones, with which the ground was strewn, pushed gay ferns, in all the luxury of their rich fringes, and standing motionless, their leaves unstirred by the breeze. In damp nooks green grasses rose up on their high stalks; and the white clover bent its heavy head, overcome, as it were, with dreamy lassitude. And above flowed the murmur of the forest, the mingling sighs of the old pine-wood. Besides “The Forest Whispers,” two stories belong especially to Korolenko’s Little-Russian group--“Iom-Kipour” (the Jewish Day of Expiation) and “The Blind Musician.” The former relates how a Little-Russian miller, good Christian though he is, narrowly escapes being carried away by the Devil, in the place of the Jewish tavern-keeper Iankiel, because, like him, he has tried to make money out of the poor peasants--the same tendency to penetrate to the inner life which we discover in other of Korolenko’s work, for he rose above the realistic school, with its pathological records.