A hunter, lost at night, comes upon peasant boys tending horses by a fire and listens to their stories of ghosts, water sprites, and portents. Turgenev's sketch, part of A Sportsman's Sketches, captures the Russian countryside with such tenderness that you can feel the dew and hear the fire crackle. The boys' superstitions are presented without condescension; their world is as real as any. The piece helped shape Russian realism and contributed to the abolition of serfdom by showing peasants as fully human. It is barely twenty pages. It contains a whole universe.