he flowers, like the full moon
amid the stars, a round sunflower, with a great, glowing face, turned
after the sun from the east to the west.

Beside the fence stretched long, narrow, rounded hillocks, free from
trees, bushes, and flowers: this was the cucumber patch. They had grown
finely; with their great, spreading leaves they covered the beds as with a
wrinkled carpet. Amid them walked a girl, dressed in white, sinking up to
her knees in the May greenery; stepping down from the beds into the
furrows, she seemed not to walk but to swim over the leaves and to bathe
in their bright colour. Her head was shaded with a straw hat, from her
brow there waved two pink ribbons and some tresses of bright, loose hair;
in her hands she held a basket, and her eyes were lowered; her right hand
was raised as if to pluck something: as a little girl when bathing tries
to catch the fishes that sport with her tiny feet, so she at every instant
bent down with her hands and her basket to gather the cucumbers against
which she brushed with her foot, or of which her eye caught sight.

The Count, struck with so marvellous a sight, stood still. Hearing from
afar the trampling of his comrades, he motioned to them with his hand to
stop their horses: they halted. He gazed with outstretched neck, like a
long-billed crane that stands apart from the flock, on one leg, keeping
guard with watchful eyes, and holding a stone in the other foot, in order
not to fall asleep.

The Count was awakened by a pattering on his shoulders and brow; it was
the Bernardine, Father Robak, who held aloft in his hand the knotted cords
of his belt.

"Will you have cucumbers?" he cried; "Here they are!" [So saying he showed
him the knots on his belt, which were shaped like cucumbers.41] "Look out
for danger, in this garden patch there is no fruit for you; nothing will
come of it!"

Then he threatened him with his finger, adjusted his cowl, and departed;
the Count tarried on the spot a moment more, cursing and yet laughing at
this sudden hindrance. He glanced at die garden, but she was no longer in
the garden; only her pink ribbon and her white gown flashed through the
window. On the garden bed one could see the path by which she had flown,
for the green leaves, spurned by her foot in her flight, raised themselves
and trembled an instant before they became quiet, like water cut by the
wings of a bird. Only on the place where she had been standing, her
abandoned willow