The lady with the bird-like face was pecking candy, holding the box under her very nose.

Pavlinka went away to the edge of the raft and, standing there, threw orange peels into the water.
"I never before participated in such an absurd outing and--company," said Zvantzev, to his neighbour, plaintively.
And Foma watched him with a smile, delighted that this feeble and ugly-looking man felt bored, and that Sasha had insulted him.

Now and then he cast at her a kind glance of approval.

He was pleased with the fact that she was so frank with everybody and that she bore herself proudly, like a real gentlewoman.
The peasant seated himself on the boards at her feet, clasped his knees in his hands, lifted his face to her and seriously listened to her words.
"You must raise your voice, when I lower mine, understand ?" "I understand; but, Madam, you ought to hand me some just to give me courage!" "Foma, give him a glass of brandy!" And when the peasant emptied it, cleared his throat with pleasure, licked his lips and said: "Now, I can do it," she ordered, knitting her brow: "Begin!" The peasant made a wry mouth, lifted his eyes to her face, and started in a high-pitched tenor: "I cannot drink, I cannot eat." Trembling in every limb, the woman sobbed out tremulously, with strange sadness: "Wine cannot gladden my soul." The peasant smiled sweetly, tossed his head to and fro, and closing his eyes, poured out into the air a tremulous wave of high-pitched notes: "Oh, time has come for me to bid goodbye!" And the woman, shuddering and writhing, moaned and wailed: "Oi, from my kindred I must part." Lowering his voice and swaying to and fro, the peasant declaimed in a sing-song with a remarkably intense expression of anguish: "Alas, to foreign lands I must depart." When the two voices, yearning and sobbing, poured forth into the silence and freshness of the evening, everything about them seemed warmer and better; everything seemed to smile the sorrowful smile of sympathy on the anguish of the man whom an obscure power is tearing away from his native soil into some foreign place, where hard labour and degradation are in store for him.

It seemed as though not the sounds, nor the song, but the burning tears of the human heart in which the plaint had surged up--it seemed as though these tears moistened the air.