Vanya looked at it.
"Grandfather," he asked, "when the frost went, which was water first—the big river or the little river?"
"Why, the little river, of course," said old Peter. "It's always the little streams that wake first in the spring, and running down to the big river make it swell and flood and break up the ice. It's always been so ever since the quarrel between the Vazouza and the Volga."
"What was that?" said Vanya.
"It was like this," said old Peter.
The Vazouza and the Volga flow for a long way side by side, and then they join and flow together. And the Vazouza is a little river; but the Volga is the mother of all Russia, and the greatest river in the world.
And the little Vazouza was jealous of the Volga.
"You are big and noisy," she says to the Volga, "and terribly strong; but as for brains," says she, "why, I have more brains in a single ripple than you in all that lump of water."