It was a Sunday morning in the finest stretch of spring. Georg Bendemann, a young merchant, sat in his private room upstairs in one of the low, flimsily built houses that ran along the river in a long row, distinguishable almost only by their height and color. He had just finished a letter to a childhood friend living abroad, sealed it with playful slowness and then, his elbow propped on the desk, looked out the window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the far bank with their pale green. 

He thought about how this friend, dissatisfied with his prospects at home, had years ago practically fled to Russia. He was running a business now in Petersburg, which had started out quite promisingly but seemed to have been stalling for some time, as the friend complained on his increasingly rare visits. And so he wore himself out uselessly in a foreign country, the strange-looking full beard doing a poor job of concealing the face well known since childhood... 

This translation aims to stay as close to the original text as possible while reading naturally in English.

Franz Kafka
THE JUDGMENT
ISBN: 979-8254595939