Little Ólga jumped up, smoothing down with both hands her tangled flaxen hair. But Fédka, who lay beside her, continued to lie with his head hidden in a sheepskin coat, and only rubbed with a rough little heel the shapely childish foot that peeped from under the coat.
The previous evening the children had arranged to go strawberry-picking, and Taráska had promised to call his sisters and little brother as soon as he came back with the horses. He had kept his promise. In the night, sitting under a bush, he had felt extremely sleepy, but now he was wide awake, and decided not to lie down at all, but to go strawberry-picking with the girls. His mother gave him a mug of milk and cut him a chunk of bread, and he sat down on the high bench by the table to eat his breakfast. Then, dressed only in a pair of trousers and a shirt, he hurried along the road, leaving the prints of his bare feet in the dust—which already bore a number of smaller and larger footprints, distinctly showing the imprint of the little toes. Far ahead he could see the girls, like red and white specks against the dark green of the forest. In the evening they had prepared a little jug and a mug to put the berries in; and this morning, after crossing themselves once or twice before the icon, they had run out without breakfast, and without even taking a bit of bread with them. Taráska caught them up near the big forest, just as they turned off the road.
The bushes, and even the lower branches of the trees, were covered with dew. The girls’ little bare feet at first grew cold, and then began to glow, as they stepped now on the soft grass and now on the rough earth. The strawberries grew chiefly where the trees had been felled. The girls first went to the part where the trees had been cut the year before and the young shoots had only just begun to grow: where between the sappy little bushes were patches of long grass, amid which the rosy-white strawberries—with here and there a red one—hid and ripened. The little girls, bent nearly double, picked the berries one by one with their small brown fingers, putting the worst in their mouths and the best ones into the mugs.