oned engine, with a carriage or two attached, which plies
between Besztercebanya and Selmeczbanya, but even that does not pass
near to Glogova. It will take at least five hundred years to bring it up
to that pitch of civilization other villages have reached.

The soil is poor, a sort of clay, and very little will grow there except
oats and potatoes, and even these have to be coaxed from the ground. A
soil like that cannot be spoken of as "Mother Earth," it is more like
"Mother-in-law Earth." It is full of pebbles, and has broad cracks here
and there, on the borders of which a kind of whitish weed grows, called
by the peasants "orphans' hair." Is the soil too old? Why, it cannot be
older than any other soil, but its strength has been used up more
rapidly. Down below in the plain they have been growing nothing but
grass for about a thousand years, but up here enormous oak-trees used to
grow; so it is no wonder that the soil has lost its strength. Poverty
and misery are to be found here, and yet a certain feeling of romance
takes possession of one at the sight of it. The ugly peasant huts seem
only to heighten the beauty of the enormous rocks which rise above us.
It would be a sin to build castles there, which, with their ugly modern
towers, would hide those wild-looking rocks.

The perfume of the elder and juniper fills the air, but there are no
other flowers, except here and there in one of the tiny gardens, a
mallow, which a barefooted, fair-haired Slovak girl tends, and waters
from a broken jug. I see the little village before me, as it was in
1873, when I was there last; I see its small houses, the tiny gardens
sown partly with clover, partly with maize, with here and there a
plum-tree, its branches supported by props. For the fruit-trees at least
did their duty, as though they had decided to make up to the poor
Slovaks for the poverty of their harvest.

When I was there the priest had just died, and we had to take an
inventory of his possessions. There was nothing worth speaking of, a few
bits of furniture, old and well worn, and a few shabby cassocks. But
the villagers were sorry to lose the old priest.

"He was a good man," they said, "but he had no idea of economy, though,
after all, he had not very much to economize with."

"Why don't you pay your priest better?" we asked. And a big burly
peasant answered:

"The priest is not our servant, but the servant of God, and every master
must pay his own servant."