but the features of the face, the sweet sleepy smile, just what was characteristic and important, slipped through his imagination like quicksilver through the fingers.  When he had ridden on half a mile, he looked back:  the yellow church, the house, and the river, were all bathed in light; the river with its bright green banks, with the blue sky reflected in it and glints of silver in the sunshine here and there, was very beautiful.  Ryabovitch gazed for the last time at Myestetchki, and he felt as sad as though he were parting with something very near and dear to him.

And before him on the road lay nothing but long familiar, uninteresting pictures. . . .  To right and to left, fields of young rye and buckwheat with rooks hopping about in them.  If one looked ahead, one saw dust and the backs of men’s heads; if one looked back, one saw the same dust and faces. . . .  Foremost of all marched four men with sabres—­this was the vanguard.  Next, behind, the crowd of singers, and behind them the trumpeters on horseback.  The vanguard and the chorus of singers, like torch-bearers in a funeral procession, often forgot to keep the regulation distance and pushed a long way ahead. . . .  Ryabovitch was with the first cannon of the fifth battery.  He could see all the four batteries moving in front of him.  For any one not a military man this long tedious procession of a moving brigade seems an intricate and unintelligible muddle; one cannot understand why there are so many people round one cannon, and why it is drawn by so many horses in such a strange network of harness, as though it really were so terrible and heavy.  To Ryabovitch it was all perfectly comprehensible and therefore uninteresting.  He had known for ever so long why at the head of each battery there rode a stalwart bombardier, and why he was called a bombardier; immediately behind this bombardier could be seen the horsemen of the first and then of the middle units.  Ryabovitch knew that the horses on which they rode, those on the left, were called one name, while those on the right were called another—­it was extremely uninteresting.  Behind the horsemen came two shaft-horses.  On one of them sat a rider with the dust of yesterday on his back and a clumsy and funny-looking piece of wood on his leg.  Ryabovitch knew the object of this piece of wood, and did not think it funny.  All the riders waved their whips mechanically and shouted from time to time.  The cannon itself was ugly.  On the fore part lay sacks of oats covered with canvas, and the cannon itself was hung all over with kettles, soldiers’ knapsacks, bags, and looked like some small harmless animal surrounded for some unknown reason by men and horses.  To the leeward of it marched six men, the gunners, swinging their arms.  After the cannon there came again more bombardiers, riders, shaft-horses, and behind them another cannon, as ugly and unimpressive as the first.  After the second followed a third, a fourth; near the fourth an officer, and so on.  There were six batteries in all in the brigade, and four cannons in each battery.  The procession covered half a mile; it ended in a string of wagons near which an extremely attractive creature—­the ass, Magar, brought by a battery commander from Turkey—­paced pensively with his long-eared head drooping.