The Passage - P83 Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev

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The Passage (P83 Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev) The country through which they were driving was not in the least picturesque.  Field after field stretched away to the horizon, now sloping gently up, now dropping down again.  Here and there was a copse, and winding ravines sparsely planted with low bushes, reminding one of
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the way in which the old maps showed them in the time of Catherine.  There were little streams, too, with hollow banks and diminutive ponds with narrow dams, hamlets with squat little huts beneath blackened and often half collapsing roofs, and crooked threshing barns with wattled walls and gaping doorways opening on to abandoned threshing floors, and churches, some brick-built with the stucco peeling off in patches, others of wood with crosses awry and churchyards that had gone to wrack and ruin slowly Arkydy’s heart sank.  As though to complete the pattern the peasants whom they met on the way ...

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