He sat down on the wet earth and began rolling up a bit of newspaper into a cigarette. Like his voice, everything about the man was small and out of keeping with his height, his breadth, and his fleshy face: his smiles, his eyes, his buttons, his tiny cap, which would hardly keep on his big, closely-cropped head. When he talked and smiled there was something womanish, timid, and meek about his puffy, shaven face and his whole figure. “What weather! God help us!” he said, and he turned his head from side to side. “Folk have not carried the oats yet, and the rain seems as though it had been taken on for good, God bless it.” The shepherd looked at the sky, from which a drizzling rain was falling, at the wood, at the bailif’s wet clothes, pondered, and said nothing. “The whole summer has been the same,” sighed Meliton. “A bad business for the peasants and no pleasure for the gentry.” The shepherd looked at the sky again, thought a moment, and said deliberately, as though chewing each word: “It’s all going the same way.... There is nothing good to be looked for.” “How are things with you here?” Meliton inquired, lighting his cigarette. “Haven’t you seen any coveys of grouse in the Artamonovs’ clearing?” The shepherd did not answer at once. He looked again at the sky and to right and left, thought a little, blinked.... Apparently he attached no little significance to his words, and to increase their value tried to pronounce them with deliberation and a certain solemnity. The expression of his face had the sharpness and staidness of old age, and the fact that his nose had a saddle-shaped depression across the middle and his nostrils turned upwards gave him a sly and sarcastic look. “No, I believe I haven’t,” he said. “Our huntsman Eryomka was saying that on Elijah’s Day he started one covey near Pustoshye, but I dare say he was lying. There are very few birds.” “Yes, brother, very few.... Very few everywhere! The shooting here, if one is to look at it with common sense, is good for nothing and not worth having. There is no game at all, and what there is is not worth dirtying your hands over--it is not full-grown. It is such poor stuff that one is ashamed to look at it.” Meliton gave a laugh and waved his hands. “Things happen so queerly in this world that it is simply laughable and nothing else. Birds nowadays have become so unaccountable: they sit late on their eggs, and there are some, I declare, that have not hatched them by St. Peter’s Day!” “It’s all going the same,” said the shepherd, turning his face upwards. “There was little game last year, this year there are fewer birds still, and in another five years, mark my words, there will be none at all. As far as I can see there will soon be not only no game, but no birds at all.” “Yes,” Meliton assented, after a moment’s thought. “That’s true.” The shepherd gave a bitter smile and shook his head.