Read an Excerpt

BOOK II.-THE CASTLE ARGUMENT ' Hunting the hare with houndsA guest in the castleThe last of the retainers tells the story of .the last of the HoreszkosA glance into the gardenThe girl among the cucumbersBreakfastPani Telimena's St. Petersburg storyNew outbreak of the quarrel over Bobtail and Falcon The intervention of Robak The Seneschal's speechThe wagerOff for mushrooms. Who among us does not remember the years when, as a young lad, with his gun on his shoulder, he went whistling into the fields, where no rampart, no fence blocked his path; where, when you overstepped a boundary strip, you did not recognise it as belonging to another ! For in Lithuania a hunter is like a ship upon the sea; wherever he will, and by whatever path he will, he roams far and wide ! Like a prophet he gazes on the sky, where in the clouds there are many signs that the hunter's eye can see; or like an enchanter he talks with the earth, which, though deaf to city-dwellers, whispers into his ear with a multitude of voices. There a land rail calls from the meadowit is vain to seek it, for it flees away through the grass like a pike in the Niemen ; there above your head sounds the bell of early spring, the lark, hidden as deeply in the sky; there an eagle rustles with its broad wings through the airy heights, spreading terror among sparrows as a comet among stars; or a hawk, hanging beneath the clear blue vault, flutters its wings like a butterfly impaled on a pin, until, catching sight in the meadow of a bird or a hare, it swoops upon it from on high like a falling star. . When will the Lord God permit us to return from N, our wanderings, and again to dwell upon our ancestral fields, and to serve in thecavalry that makes war on rabbits, or in the infantry that bears arms ag...