“Mamma, Syómka’s tsoking!” the lisping little girl suddenly cried from their cubicle. Akoulína tore herself away, and ran to her room. The baby did not stir, and his little legs were not moving. Akoulína snatched him out, but he did not breathe or move. She threw him down on the bed, and, with arms akimbo, burst into such loud, ringing, terrible laughter that Mary, who at first had started laughing herself, covered her ears with her hands, and ran out into the passage crying. The crowd thronged into the cubicle, wailing and weeping. They carried out the little body and began rubbing it, but in vain. Akoulína tossed about on the bed, and laughed⁠—laughed so that all who heard her were frightened. Only now, seeing this motley crowd of men and women, old people and children, did one fully realize what a number, and what sort, of people lived in the serfs’ quarters. Everybody fussed and spoke; many wept, but nobody did anything. The joiner’s wife still found people who had not heard her tale about the way her tender feelings were shocked by the unexpected sight, and how God had saved her from falling down the ladder. An old man who had been a footman, with a woman’s jacket thrown over his shoulders, was relating how in the days of the old proprietor a woman drowned herself in the pond.