"Ah, you damned fool!" he vociferated.

"I shouted to you loud enough! Draw out, you old raven, and keep to the right! Are you drunk ?" Selifan himself felt conscious that he had been careless, but since a Russian does not care to admit a fault in the presence of strangers, he retorted with dignity: "Why have you run into US?
Did you leave your eyes behind you at the last tavern that you stopped at ?" With that he started to back the britchka, in the hope that it might get clear of the other's harness; but this would not do, for the pair were too hopelessly intertwined.

Meanwhile the skewbald snuffed curiously at his new acquaintances as they stood planted on either side of him; while the ladies in the vehicle regarded the scene with an expression of terror.
One of them was an old woman, and the other a damsel of about sixteen.

A mass of golden hair fell daintily from a small head, and the oval of her comely face was as shapely as an egg, and white with the transparent whiteness seen when the hands of a housewife hold a new-laid egg to the light to let the sun's rays filter through its shell.

The same tint marked the maiden's ears where they glowed in the sunshine, and, in short, what with the tears in her wide-open, arresting eyes, she presented so attractive a picture that our hero bestowed upon it more than a passing glance before he turned his attention to the hubbub which was being raised among the horses and the coachmen.
"Back out, you rook of Nizhni Novgorod!" the strangers' coachman shouted.