e stole
out by night to the squires' mansions, and continually whispered with the
gentry; he trudged through all the neighbouring villages, and in the
taverns talked not a little with the village boors, and always of what was
going on in foreign lands. Now he came to arouse the Judge, who had
already been an hour asleep; surely he had some tidings.

BOOK II.--THE CASTLE

ARGUMENT

Hunting the hare with hounds--A guest in the castle--The last of the
retainers tells the story of the last of the Horeszkos--A glance
into the garden--The girl among the cucumbers--Breakfast--Pani
Telimena's St. Petersburg story--New outbreak of the quarrel over
Bobtail and Falcon--The intervention of Robak--The Seneschal's
speech--The wager--Off 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 meadow--it 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 our wanderings, and again
to dwell upon our ancestral fields, and to serve in the cavalry that makes
war on rabbits, or in the infantry that bears arms against birds; to know
no other weapons than the scythe and the sickle, and no other gazettes
than the household accounts!

Over Soplicowo arose the sun, and it already fell on the thatched roofs,
and through the chink