Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/286

 Thither also came people from the village, and inquired, “Is not the sieve-maker here at your house? Is not the knife-grinder here? We wanted sieves; we wanted to have our knives sharpened.” Without fail the sieve-maker appeared regularly before harvest, and the knife-grinder as regularly before the village festival.

In those chambers beside the coach-house reigned life and jollity. There the conversation never flagged, and in the evening even Loyka, the peasant, and sometimes, finally, his wife would pay them a visit. Here all that occurred in the district of general interest was recapitulated. So that you might refer to the Loykas’s as to a well-informed gazette. The kalounkar [tape-pedlar] and the cloth-pedlar tramped the whole district and had free access into every family—who then could know more than the cloth-pedlar and the kalounkar?

And then when a fiddler and harper came, there was nothing for it but that he should play and sing over every song he knew of modern and of ancient date, every event consigned to verse, songs of comic character and sprightly pieces of music—then the evenings were gay indeed. Hither, too, from the village a few stray folk would come and form an audience. Hither also Frank led his young companion, with whom he ensconced himself somewhere in a corner and listened.

The narratives which specially pleased Frank and his parents, mostly dated from long winter evenings which include the whole circle of the marvellous, from fierce banditi to black dogs and white women, so that the young people were half dazed with fright if they had to find their way home across the court-yard or across the village green.

Such was the hospitality of the Loykas that they became proverbial. And these same Loykas treated their own father who was pensioned off upon a reserved share of the field produce, so badly that he did not even dare draw water from their well!

In these chambers was also a constant guest—Vena, the general messenger, the half crazed man. If the Loykas had told him that they did not wish to have him any longer about the place, he would not have believed that they spoke in earnest, so thoroughly was he domesticated at their house.

Those chambers by the coach-house would no longer have been themselves if Vena had not been there. With him every one who entered them must sharpen his wit, and from him every one must submit to receive some rebuff either spoken in jest or earnest.