with manifest pregnancy, and a pair of greyish-blue eyes that
had fixed in them a stare of apprehension. At the present moment
her head and yellow scarf were just showing over the tops of the
bushes; and while I noted that now it was swaying from side to
side like a sunflower shaken by the wind, I recalled the fact
that she was a woman whose husband had been carried off at
Sukhum by a surfeit of fruit--this fact being known to me through
the circumstance that in the workmen's barraque where we had
shared quarters these folk had observed the good old Russian
custom of confiding to a stranger the whole of their troubles,
and had done so in tones of such amplitude and penetration that
the querulous words must have been audible for five versts
around.

And as I had talked to these forlorn people, these human beings
who lay crushed beneath the misfortune which had uprooted them
from their barren and exhausted lands, and blown them, like
autumn leaves, towards the Caucasus where nature's luxuriant,
but unfamiliar, aspect had blinded and bewildered them, and with
its onerous conditions of labour quenched their last spark of
courage; as I had talked to these poor people I had seen them
glancing about with dull, troubled, despondent eyes, and
heard them say to one another softly, and with pitiful smiles:

"What a country!"

"Aye,-- that it is !--a country to make one sweat!"

"As hard as a stone it is!"