They made inquiries at another cottage. Driving along the broad street, they turned to the left, then to the right, and, passing some one’s old-fashioned manor-house, hermetically boarded up, they began to descend a steep declivity to a bridge across a small stream. Water trickled from Menshoff’s face, his hands, his coat. His fat face with its long white eyelashes, thus washed, looked more stupid than ever. He was gazing off into space ahead with an expression of curiosity. Kuzma gazed, also. In that direction, on the sloping pasture land, lay the dark manor-park of Kazakovo, the spacious courtyard surrounded by decaying outbuildings and the ruins of a stone wall; in the centre of the courtyard, behind three withered fir-trees, stood the house, sheathed in grey boards, with a rusty-red roof. Below, at the bridge, was a cluster of peasants. And, coming to meet them up the steep road, which was washed into gullies, a troika-team of lean work-horses, harnessed to a tarantas, was struggling through the mud and straining up the hill. A tattered but handsome labourer, tall, pale, with a small reddish beard and clever eyes, was standing beside the vehicle, jerking at the reins, exerting his utmost efforts, and shouting: “Ge-et up there! G-g-et up there!” The peasants, meanwhile, with shouts and whistling, were chiming in: “Whoa! Who-oa!” A young woman dressed in mourning, large tears hanging on her long eyelashes and her face distorted with fear, who was seated in the carriage, was throwing out her hands despairingly before her. Fear, suspense, lay in the turquoise-blue eyes of the stout, sandy-mustached young man who sat beside her. His wedding ring gleamed on his right hand, which clutched a revolver; he kept waving his left hand, and, without doubt, he must have felt very warm in his camel’s hair waistcoat and his gentleman’s peaked cap, which had slipped over on the back of his head. The children, a small boy and a girl, pallid with hunger and fatigue, wrapped in shawls, looked on with gentle curiosity from the little bench opposite the main seat. “That’s Mishka Siversky,” said Menshoff in a loud, hoarse voice, as he drove around the troika and stared indifferently at the children. “They turned him out yesterday. Evidently, he deserved it.”