“It’s a bucket broken away at the pits,” said the young shepherd after a moment’s thought.

It was by now getting light.  The Milky Way had turned pale and gradually melted like snow, losing its outlines; the sky was becoming dull and dingy so that you could not make out whether it was clear or covered thickly with clouds, and only from the bright leaden streak in the east and from the stars that lingered here and there could one tell what was coming.

The first noiseless breeze of morning, cautiously stirring the spurges and the brown stalks of last year’s grass, fluttered along the road.

The overseer roused himself from his thoughts and tossed his head.  With both hands he shook the saddle, touched the girth and, as though he could not make up his mind to mount the horse, stood still again, hesitating.

“Yes,” he said, “your elbow is near, but you can’t bite it.  There is fortune, but there is not the wit to find it.”

And he turned facing the shepherds.  His stern face looked sad and mocking, as though he were a disappointed man.

“Yes, so one dies without knowing what happiness is like...” he said emphatically, lifting his left leg into the stirrup.  “A younger man may live to see it, but it is time for us to lay aside all thought of it.”

Stroking his long moustaches covered with dew, he seated himself heavily on the horse and screwed up his eyes, looking into the distance, as though he had forgotten something or left something unsaid.  In the bluish distance where the furthest visible hillock melted into the mist nothing was stirring; the ancient barrows, once watch-mounds and tombs, which rose here and there above the horizon and the boundless steppe had a sullen and death-like look; there was a feeling of endless time and utter indifference to man in their immobility and silence; another thousand years would pass, myriads of men would die, while they would still stand as they had stood, wit h no regret for the dead nor interest in the living, and no soul would ever know why they stood there, and what secret of the steppes was hidden under them.

The rooks awakening, flew one after another in silence over the earth.  No meaning was to be seen in the languid flight of those long-lived birds, nor in the morning which is repeated punctually every twenty-four hours, nor in the boundless expanse of the steppe.

The overseer smiled and said: 

“What space, Lord have mercy upon us!  You would have a hunt to find treasure in it!  Here,” he went on, dropping his voice and making a serious face, “here there are two treasures buried for a certainty.  The gentry don’t know of them, but the old peasants, particularly the soldiers, know all about them.  Here, somewhere on that ridge [the overseer pointed with his whip] robbers one time attacked a caravan of gold; the gold was being taken from Petersburg to the Emperor Peter who was building