“Drop it, accursed one, it is mine!”
The devil dropped the miller, and once more the poor man floated downward. So it happened three times, while the marsh lying between the mill and the village spread ever wider and wider beneath them.
Splash! The miller fell into the soft mud with such a bump that the bog bounced as if it had been on springs, and threw the miller ten feet into the air. He fell down again, jumped up, and took to his heels helter-skelter as fast as his legs could carry him. As he ran he screamed at the top of his lungs, feeling every second that the devil was going to grab him.
He reached the first hut on the outskirts of the village, flew the hedge at a bound, and found himself in the middle of the widow’s cottage. Here he came to his senses for the first time.
“Well, I am in your cottage, thank God!” he said.
Just think of it, good people, what a prank he had played! There he was early in the morning, before sunrise, before even the cows had been driven out to pasture, bareheaded, barefooted, in rags, plunging into the hut of two unmarried women, a widow and a young girl! Yes, and the fact that he was hatless was a small matter; it was lucky indeed he hadn’t lost something else on the way; if he had, he would have disgraced the poor women forever! And on top of it all what did he say? “Thank God, I am in your cottage!”
The old woman could only wave her arms, but Galya jumped up in her nightgown from a bench, threw on a dress, and cried to the miller:
“What are you doing here, you wicked man? Are you so drunk that you can’t find your own hut, and so come rushing into ours, hey?”
But the miller stood in front of her looking at her with gentle if slightly staring eyes, and said: