But Ványa also very much wanted to look at Princess Eléna the Fair, and so he wept sorely, and he went to his father’s grave, and his father heard him in his last home, and he came up to him, shook off the grey earth from his forehead, and said, “Do not grieve, Vanyúshka; I will aid you in your sorrow.” Then the old man got up, whistled and halloed with a young man’s voice, with a nightingale’s trill; and from some source or other a horse ran up, and the earth trembled, and from his nostrils and from his ears flames issued forth. He breathed smoke, and stood in front of the old man as though he were rooted to the ground, and asked him, “What do you wish?”
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