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.

“Ólga dear, come here! Here’s an awful lot!”

“Nonsense!⁠ ⁠… Hullo!” they called to each other when they got behind the bushes.