COUNTRY FOLK
Feivke was a wild little villager, shout seven years old, who bed tumbled up from babyhood among Gentile urchins, the only Jewish boy in the place, just as his father Mattes, the Kozlev smith, war the only Jewish householder there. Feivke had hardly ever met, or even seen, anyone but the people of Kozlov and their children. Had it mot been for his black eyes, with their moody, persistent gaze from beneath the shade of a deep, worn out leather cap, it would have puzzled anyone to make out his parentage, to know whence that torn and battered face, that red sear across the top lip, those large, black, flat, unchild-like feet. But the eyes explained everything—his mother's eyes.
Feivke spent the whole summer with the village urchins in the neighboring wood, picking mushrooms, climbing the trees, driving wood-pigeons off their high nests, or wading knee-deep in the shallow bog outside to seek the Black, slippery bog-worms; or else be found himself out in the fields, jumping about on the top of a load of bay under a hot sky, and shouting to bis companions, till he was bathed in perspiration. At other times, be gathered himself away into a dark, cool barn, scrambled at the peril of his life along a round beam under the roof, crunched dried pears, saw how the sun sprinkled the darkness with a thousand sparks, and—thought. He could always think about Mikita. the son of the village elder, who had almost risen to be conductor on a railway train, and who came from a long way of to visit
