started on his homeward way.

His path led through wide-stretching fields and vineyards past a little
hill, some distance from the village, on which stood a large house. It
was not a pleasant house to look at, not a house one would care to live
in, even if one did not know its use, for it looked bare and repellant,
covered with its ugly yellow paint, and with all the windows secured
with heavy iron bars. The trees that surrounded it were tall and
thick-foliaged, casting an added gloom over the forbidding appearance
of the house. At the foot of the hill was a high iron fence, cutting off
what lay behind it from all the rest of the world. For this ugly yellow
house enclosed in its walls a goodly sum of hopeless human misery and
misfortune. It was an insane asylum.

For twenty years now, the asylum had stood on its hill, a source of
superstitious terror to the villagers, but at the same time a source of
added income. It meant money for them, for it afforded a constant and
ever-open market for their farm products and the output of their home
industry. But every now and then a scream or a harsh laugh would ring
out from behind those barred windows, and those in the village who could
hear, would shiver and cross themselves. Shepherd Janci had little fear
of the big house. His little hut cowered close by the high iron gates,
and he had a personal acquaintance with most of the patients, with all
of the attendants, and most of all, with the kind elderly physician who
was the head of the establishment. Janci knew them all, and had a kind
word equally for all. But otherwise he was a silent man, living much
within himself.

When the shepherd reached his little home, his wife came to meet him
with a call to breakfast. As they sat down at the table a shadow moved
past the little window. Janci looked up. "Who was that?" asked Margit,
looking up from her folded hands. She had just finished her murmured
prayer.

"Pastor's Liska," replied Janci indifferently, beginning his meal.
(Liska was the local abbreviation for Elizabeth.)'

"In such a hurry?" thought the shepherd's wife. Her curiosity would not
let her rest. "I hope His Reverence isn't ill again," she remarked after
a while. Janci did not hear her, for he was very busy picking a fly out
of his milk cup.

"Do you think Liska was going for the old man?" began Margit again after
a few minutes.

The "old man" was the name given by the people of the village, more as
a term of