Forest, , , fields, a sky—and the crossways! The sky is at times with dove-coloured clouds; the forest now gabbles, now in the glittering summer sunshine.  
The crossways creep and crawl like a thread, without beginning and without end. Sometimes their stretch tires and vexes— one wants to go by a shorter route and turns aside, goes astray, comes back to the former way. Two wheel-tracks, grass, a foot- path and around them, besides sky or rye or snow or trees, are the crossways, without beginning or end or limit. And over them pass the peasants singing their low toned songs. At times these are sorrowful, as endless as the crossways themselves: Russia was borne in these songs, born with them, from them.
 
Our ways lie through the crossways as they ever have done, and ever will. All Russia is in the crossways—amid the fields, thickets marshes, and forests.
 
But there were also those Others who wanted to march over the bog- ways, who planned to throw Russia on to her haunches, to press on through the marshlands, make main-roads straight as rules, and themselves behind and steel, forgetful of Russia's peasant cottages. And on they marched!
 
Sometimes the main-road is joined by the crossways, and from them to the main-road and over it passes the long vaunted Rising, the people's , to sweep away the Unnecessary, then vanish back again into the crossways.
 
Near the main-road lies the railway. By turning aside from it, walking through a field, fording a river, first through a dark aspen , then through a red pine belt, skirting some ravines, threading a way across a village, wearily through dried-up river-beds and on through a , the village of Pochinki is reached, surrounded by forest.
 
In the village were three cottages, their backs to the forest; their noses seemed to from beneath the pine-trees, and their dim, tear-dribbling window-eyes looked wolfish. Their grey timbers lay on them like wrinkles, their reddish-yellow , like bobbed hair, hung to the ground. Behind them was the forest; in front, pasture, thickets, forest again, and sky. The neighbouring crossways coiled round them in a ring, then narrowed away into the forest.
 
In all three cottages dwelt Kononovs: they were not kinsfolk, though they bore that name, closer linked through their common life than ever were. Kononov-Yonov, the One-Eyed, was the village elder: he no longer remembered his grandfather's name, but knew the olden times well, and remembered how his great-grandfathers and his great-great-grandfathers had lived and how it was good for men to live.
 
From the oldest to the youngest they with all their strength from spring to autumn, from autumn to spring, and from sunrise to sundown, growing grey like their hen-coops from smoke, in the heat and steaming sweat like boiling .
 
The kinsfolk of Yonov the One-eyed made tar besides tilling the land, while Yonov himself kept bee-hives in the forest. The sisters Yonov barked lime-trees and made bast shoes. It was a hard, stern life, with its smoke, heat, frosts, and languour; but they loved it profoundly.
 
The Kononovs lived alone in friendship with the woods, the fields, and the sky; yet ever engaged in stubborn struggle against them. They had to remember the rise and set of the sun, the nights and the dung- . They had to look into corners, watch for cold blasts from the north, and give ear to the and gabbling of the forest.
 
They knew:
 
  With January, mid-winter time,
  Starts the year its frosty prime,
  Blows wild the wind e'er yet'tis still,
  Crackles the ice in the frozen rill;
  Epiphany betimes is past,
  Approaches now the Lenten Fast.
  In February there's a breath of heat,
  Summer and winter at Candlemas meet.
  In April the year grows moist and warm the air,
  The old folks' lives without their doors bids fair;
  The woodcock then comes flying from the sea,
  Brings back the Spring from its .
  Under a showery sky,
  Bloom wide the fields of rye,
  Ever blue and chill
  May will the granaries fill.
It was necessary to work stubbornly, sternly, in harmony with the earth, to fight hand-to-hand with the forest, the , the plough and the . They had learnt to keep their eyes wide open, for each had to hold his own against the wood-spirit, the rumbling forest, famine, and the marshes. They had learnt to know their Mother-Earth by the birds, sky, wind, and stars, like those men of whom Yonov the One-Eyed told them—those who of old wended their way to Chuvsh tribes and the Murman Forest.
 
All the Kononovs were built alike, strong, rugged, with short legs and broad, heavy feet like juniper-roots, long backs, arms that hung down to their knees, shoulder-blades as though made for harness, mossy green eyes that gazed with a slow stubborn look, and noses like earthen whistles.
 
They lived with the rye, horses, cows, the sheep, the woods, and the grass. They knew that as the rye dropped seeds to the ground and reproduced in abundance so also bred beast and bird, death with birth. They knew too that to breed was also man's lot.
 
Ulyanka reached her seventeenth year, Ivan his eighteenth: they bowed to the winds and went to the altar.
 
Ivan Kononov did not think of death when he went to the war, for what was death when through it came birth? Were there not heat-waves and drought in summer? Did not the winter sweep the earth by ? Yet in spring all began to again with life.
 
The War came: Ivan Kononov went without understanding, without reason—what concern was it of Pochinki? He was dragged through towns, he pined in spittle-stained barracks; and then he was sent to the Carpathians. He fired. He fought hand-to-hand: he fled; he retreated forty versts a day, resting in the woods singing his peasant-songs with the soldiers—and for Pochinki. He found all like Grandfather Yonov the One-Eyed; he learnt of the land in the olden time order, of the people's Rising. At its approach he went on furlough to Pochinki, met it there, and there remained.
 
The Rising came like happy tidings, like the cool breath of dawn, like a May-time shower:
 
  Under a showery sky
  Bloom wide the fields of rye,
  Ever blue and chill
  May will the granaries fill.
there were the village , the district clerk, , requisitions, and taxations; for then it was the who were the . But now, Yonov the One-Eyed :
 
"Now it's ourselves! We ourselves! In our own way! In our own world!
The land is ours! We are the masters: it is the Rising! Our Rising!"
There were no storms that winter; it was cold and dark, and the wolf- packs were astir. One after another the inhabitants were stricken down with typhoid—it was with typhoid that they paid for the Rising! Half the village and was borne on the peasants' sleighs to the churchyard.
 
By Candlemas, when winter and summer meet, all the provisions were , and the villagers drove to the station. But even that had changed. New people there, some shouting, others hurrying to and fro with sacks. The villagers returned with nothing and sat down to their potatoes.
 
In the spring prayers were offered up for the dead and a religious procession paraded round the village, the of which were bestrewn with ashes. Then the villagers started to take tar and bast shoes to the station; they wanted to sell them, and with the proceeds buy ploughshares, harr............