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warm sheepskin coat, straightenedher clothes, and no one would have been able to tell that a minute before she had been riding on a broom.
    The mother of the blacksmith Vakula was no more than forty years old.She was neither pretty nor ugly.It’s hard to be pretty at such an age.Nevertheless, she knew so well how to charm the gravest of Cossacks over to herself (it won’t hurt to observe in passing that they couldn’t care less about beauty) that she was visited by the headman, and the deacon Osip Nikiforovich (when his wife wasn’t home, of course), and the Cossack Korniy Choub, and the Cossack Kasian Sverbyguz.And, to do her credit, she knew how to handle them very skillfully.It never occurred to any one of them that he had a rival.If on Sunday a pious muzhik or squire, as the Cossacks call themselves, wearing a cloak with a hood, went to church—or, in case of bad weather, to the tavern—how could he not stop by at Solokha’s, to eat fatty dumplings with sour cream and chat in a warm cottage with a talkative and gregarious hostess?And for that purpose the squire would make a big detour before reaching the tavern, and called it “stopping on the way.” And when Solokha would go to church on a feast day, putting on a bright gingham shift with a gold-embroidered blue skirt and a nankeen apron over it, and if she were to stand just by the right-hand choir, the deacon was sure to cough and inadvertently squint in that direction; the headman would stroke his mustache, twirl his topknot around his ear, and say to the man standing next to him, “A fine woman!A devil of a woman!”
    Solokha nodded to everyone, and everyone thought she was nodding to him alone.But anyone who liked meddling into other people’s affairs would have noticed at once that Solokha was most amiable with the Cossack Choub.Choub was a widower.Eight stacks of wheat always stood in front of his house.Two yoke of sturdy oxen always stuck their heads from the wattle shed outside and mooed whenever they saw a chummy cow or their fat bull uncle coming.A bearded goat climbed on the roof and from there bleated in a sharp voice, like a mayor, teasing the turkey hens who strutted about the yard and turning his back whenever he caught sight of his enemies, the boys who made fun of his beard.In Choub’s chests there were quantities of linen, fur coats, oldstylejackets with gold braid—his late wife had liked dressing up.In his kitchen garden, besides poppies, cabbages, and sunflowers, two plots of tobacco were planted every year.All this Solokha thought it not superfluous to join to her own property, reflecting beforehand on the order that would be introduced into it once it passed into her hands, and she redoubled her benevolence toward old Choub.And to keep Vakula from getting round his daughter and laying hands on it all for himself, thus certainly preventing any mixing in on her part, she resorted to the usual way of all forty-year-old hens: making Choub and the blacksmith quarrel as often as possible.Maybe this keenness and cunning were responsible for the rumors started here and there by the old women, especially when they’d had a drop too much at some merry gathering, that Solokha was in fact a witch; that the Kizyakolupenko lad had seen she had a tail behind no longer than a spindle; that just two weeks ago Thursday she had crossed the road as a black cat; that the priest’s wife once had a sow run in, crow like a rooster, put Father Kondrat’s hat on her head, and run back out.
    It so happened that as the old women were discussing it, some cowherd by the name of Tymish Korostyavy came along.He didn’t fail to tell how in the summer, just before the Peter and Paul fast, 3 as he lay down to sleep in the shed, putting some straw under his head, he saw with his own eyes a witch with her hair down, in nothing but a shirt, start milking the cows, and he was so spellbound he couldn’t move; after milking the cows, she came up to him and smeared