Night comes down over the open steppe, and a hunter who has lost his way stumbles to the edge of a wide hollow where two fires burn and a circle of peasant boys sit guarding the horses till morning. He lies in the grass, pretends to sleep, and listens. The boys trade the stories children tell in the dark: the water-sprite laughing in the reeds, the drowned who will not lie still, the dead master hunting the meadow for his grass, the forest spirit that walks a man in circles until dawn. Around them Turgenev pours the whole Russian night, the warm dark and the smell of the grass, the firelight trembling on each frightened face, and he loves these boys with a tenderness that never once tips into pity. Then, in a single line at the close, he tells you which of them did not live out the year, and the whole long beautiful night turns into an elegy you did not know you were reading.