"And this heretic child was altogether wicked; he did not believe in Christ the Lord, did not love the mother of God, always went past the church without lifting his cap, would not obey his father and mother."
The children listened to the thin, quavering voice of the old man and looked silently into his face.
The fair-haired Jashka, son of the potman Petrusha, listened and looked more attentively than all the rest. He was a lean, sharp-nosed boy, with a big head on a thin neck. When he ran, his head always rolled from one side to the other as though it would shake loose from his body. His eyes were big and strangely restless. They shifted anxiously over everything as if they were afraid to rest anywhere, and when at last they rested on anything they rolled oddly in their sockets, and gave the lad a sheepish expression. He stood out from the rest also by his delicate bloodless face, and his clean, respectable clothes. Ilya quickly made friends with him, and the very first day of their acquaintance Jashka asked his new playmate with a mysterious air:
"Are there many wizards in your village?"
"Of course," answered Ilya, "several, and witches too—our neighbour could work magic."
"Had he red hair?" asked Jakov, in a trembling voice.
"No, grey. They always have grey hair."
"The grey ones are not wicked, they are good-hearted. But the red-haired ones—ah, I tell you, they drink blood."
They were sitting in the prettiest, pleasantest corner of the courtyard behind the rubbish heap under the lime tree and the elder bushes. It was reached through a narrow crack between the sheds and the house; it was always quiet there, and nothing could be seen but the sky over their heads and the house wall with three windows, two of them boarded up. It became the favourite corner of the two friends. The sparrows hopped twittering about the lime-tree branches, and the boys sat on the ground at its root and chattered of everything that interested them.
All day long before Ilya's eyes whirled a great, gay something, noisy and shouting, that blinded and deafened him. At first he was quite confused by the wild pell-mell of this life. In the bar Ilya would often stand by the table where uncle Terenti, dripping with sweat, and wet with water, rinsed the dishes and glasses and saw how people came, and ate, and drank, shouted and sang, kissed and fought. They were covered with sweat, dirty and tired; clouds of tobacco smoke enwrapped them, and in this fog they rioted like madmen.