Once in his life the reindeer must taste of the sea in one long, satisfying draught, and if he is hindered he perishes.

Neither man nor beast dare stand between him and the ocean in the hundred miles of his arrow-like path.
Something of this longing came upon the Cossack, as he suddenly remembered the sour taste of the kvass, to the recollection of which he had been somehow led by a train of thought which had begun with Vjera's love for the Count, to end abruptly in a camp kettle.

For the heart of man is much the same everywhere, and there is nothing to show that the step from the sublime to the ridiculous is any longer in the Don country than in any other part of the world.

But between poor Johann Schmidt and his draught of kvass there lay obstacles not encountered by the reindeer in his race for the Arctic Ocean.

There was the wife, and there were the children, and there was the vast distance, so vast that it might have discouraged even the fleet-footed scourer of the northern snows.