handed and dignified fight
against ill-fortune which he had always waged.

"If you have a grievance," he always said to those who brought their
tales of woe to his ears, "air it as much as you like, but speak up, and
do not whine."

He had to listen to a great number of such tales, and to the majority
of grievances could suggest no cure; for they were the grievances of
Poland, and in these later times of Finland also, to which it appears
there is no cure.

"I shall make a long round to-day," he said to Wanda, when he was in the
saddle, with his short, old-fashioned stirrup, his great boots covering
his knee and thigh from the wind, and his weather-beaten old face
looking out from the fur collar of his riding-coat. "It may be the last
time this winter. The spring must come soon."

And he went away at an easy canter.

Wanda, left alone for the whole day in the stillness of this forest
farm, had her round to do also. She set out on foot soon after her
father's departure, bound to a distant cottage in the depths of the
pine-woods. The trees were quiet this morning; for it is only at the
time of thaw, when the snow, gathering moisture from the atmosphere,
gains in weight and breaks down the branches, that the woods crack as
beneath the tread of some stealthy giant. But a frost seems to brace the
trees which in the colder weather stand grim and silent, bearing their
burden without complaint.

The sky was cloudless and the air quite still. There is no silence like
that of a northern pine-wood in winter; for the creatures living in
the twilight there have been given by God silent feet and a stealthy
habit--the smaller ones going in fear of the larger, and the beasts of
prey ever alert for their natural enemy--man. The birds kept for the
most part to the outer fringes of the forest, nearer to the crops and
the few, far cottages.

Wanda had grown from childhood amid the pines, and the gloomy
forest-paths were so familiar as to have lost all power to impress her.
In the nursery she had heard tales of wolves and bears, but had never
seen them. They might be near or far; they might be watching through the
avenues of straight and motionless stems. In their childhood it had been
the delight of Martin and herself to trace in the snow the footprints
of the wolves--near the house, in the garden, right up to the nursery
window. They had gradually acquired the indifference of the peasants who
work in the fields, or the woodmen at