The mill clattered unceasingly; beneath its wheels, all overgrown with icicles like a long greenish mane, the stream went rushing noisily on. The saws rasped away with continuous crackling harshness, as the sound of one biting glass to bits, and they spat the yellow sawdust forth. Matthew was everywhere, active and indefatigable, always shouting and urging the toilers to hurry up. He filled the whole place, nimble as a goldfinch pecking at hempseed; his short red-striped spencer, his grey sheepskin cap, were seen flying about over the trodden snow covered with chips, where they were getting the logs ready—ordering, scolding, laughing, joking, whistling, and working as hard as any; but for the most part on the platform close to the saws. For this sawing-shed had no side-walls, only a roof; so that its whole interior was visible from outside. It rose above the river on four stout piles, against which the current rushed with such force and fury that the roof, made of reeds and resting only on those piles, often trembled like a wisp of straw in a gale. “A good craftsman he is, that fellow!” quoth Antek, with unwilling recognition. “And well paid too!” Bartek growled in reply. They beat their arms against their chests to keep off the increasing cold, and went on working silently. Of workmen there were enough. Two were at the saws, rolling the sawn logs down to the yard and dragging up fresh ones; two more were cutting off the one end of each log that had been left untouched, and making the sawn planks into piles or carrying into a shed those too thin to bear the outside cold; and a couple of others were stripping the bark off oak and fir and pine logs. To these last, Bartek used often to shout in jest: “Devil take you, how ye skin them! Ye’ll be pastmasters in dog-flaying, belike!” But they objected to such jokes, for they never had anything to do with the dog-killer’s craft. All these men Matthew kept so hard at work that they could only seldom and by stealth find means to run round to the mill, warm their freezing hands, and come back at a gallop, pressed hard by the work itself. Twilight was nearly over when Antek crawled home, so weary and broken that every bone in him ached. After supper he went to bed at once and, falling asleep, slept as one dead. Hanka had no heart to inquire about anything, but tried to make him as comfortable as she could, keeping the children quiet, asking her father to make no noise with his boots, and walking barefooted in the room herself; and when he prepared at daybreak to go to work, she boiled a pot of milk for him to take with potatoes for breakfast, that he might feed better and be warmed. “Confound it!” he declared; “my bones ache so, I cannot move about.” Bylitsa remarked that this was only because he was not yet accustomed to, and that it would soon pass off. “Of course it will pass off: I know that.—Hanka, will you bring me my dinner?” “I will, I will: why should you come hither so far?”