She covered her head with a yellow kerchief embroidered with blue flowers, and looking for her basket she began singing:
“The falcon came flying, the falcon came grey.”
The old man began to grumble: “If you were as fond of working as you are of singing.”
Kasya, who was standing on her tiptoes to look on a shelf, turned her head to her father, laughed merrily, and showing her white teeth, sang again as if to tease him:
“He hoots in the woods and the cuckoo’s his prey.”
“You would be glad yourself to be a cuckoo until a falcon came,” said the old man. “Perhaps ’tis falcon who is at the turpentine works? but this is folly. You can’t earn a piece of bread by singing.”
Kasya again sang:
“Hoot not thou, my falcon, unhappy thy quest,
In the depths of the lake thy cuckoo doth rest.”
Then she said:
“Wilt thou decorate the room with the evergreens for to-morrow? I shall return in time to milk the cows, but they should be brought from the pasture.”