But whether it’s true or not, I shall tell it to you as I heard it.
One evening the miller was returning from vespers in Novokamensk, which was about three versts, not more, from his mill. For some reason the miller was a little out of temper, though he himself could not have said why. Everything had gone well in the church, and our miller, who could shout with the best, had read the prayers so loudly and so fast that the good people had been astonished.
“How he does bawl, that son of a gun!” they had exclaimed with the deepest respect. “You can’t understand one word he says. He’s a regular wheel, he is; he turns and spins and you know he has spokes in him, but you can’t see a single one, no matter how closely you look. His reading sounds like an iron wheel rumbling over a stony road; you can’t catch a word of it to save your life.”
The miller heard what the people were saying among themselves, and it made him glad. He knew how to work for the glory of God, he did! He swung his tongue as a lusty lad swings a flail on a threshing floor, till he was parched to the bottom of his throat and his eyes were popping out of his head.
The priest took him home with him after church, gave him tea, and set a full bottle of herb brandy before him, and this was afterwards taken away empty. The moon was floating high above the fields, and was staring down into the swift little Stony River when the miller left the priest’s house and started home to his mill.
Some of the villagers were already asleep; some were sitting in their khatas eating their suppers by the light of a tallow-dip, and some had been tempted out into the street by the warm, clear autumn night. The old people were sitting at the doors of their khatas, but the lasses and lads had gone out under the hedges where the heavy shade of the cherry trees hid them from view, and only their low voices could be heard in various places, with an occasional peal of suppressed laughter, and now and then the incautious kiss of a young couple. Yes, many things can happen in the dense shade of a cherry tree on such a clear, warm night!
But though the miller could not see the villagers, they could see him very well because he was walking down the middle of the street in the full light of the moon. And so they occasionally called out to him as he passed:
“Good evening, Mr. Miller! Aren’t you coming from the priest’s? Is it at his house you have been such a long time?”
Every one knew that he could not have been anywhere else, but the miller liked the question, and, slackening his pace, he would answer a little proudly each time:
“Yes, yes, I’ve made him a little visit!” and then he would walk on more puffed-up than ever.