Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/294

 The musicians, fiddlers and harpers, accompanied them. Staza’s little voice penetrated like silver, Frank’s voice faithfully seconded hers, and then the music accompanied it all—it was as though tears were falling.

If you are well-versed in tales of magic you will recollect how all at once everything in a castle was turned to stone. And thus at this song everything was turned to stone in the dining-room. Here some one stretched out his hand to his neighbour and the hand remained stretched out, here another had raised his hand to tootle with it and the hand remained raised above his head, and the tootling died away in his throat. Here another wanted to turn to his neighbour, he had not quite turned towards him, neither was he altogether turned away from him. And when Joseph wanted to drink with Barushka he proffered her his glass indeed, but the glass remained in his hand, and the polite speech remained unspoken.

Into the midst of all that whistling, tootling, and babbling of tongues a knife had worked its way, and smitten all with a sudden blow. Two childish little voices had taken upon themselves to hew down an ogre, and the ogre shivered and reeled to the ground. A morsel of genuine feeling claimed a hearing, and what was untrue and unnatural tumbled to pieces like a house of cards.

The grandfather still had the last word to-day. He spoke by the mouths of those children who constrained even the harpers and fiddlers to their cause, and all that gay company in the dining-room again knew that it was the day of his funeral. Not gladly certainly, but no one could say, I do not know it.

FTER a brief of time the celebrated a wedding. The festivities passed off at Kmoch’s house—at the father’s of the bride; after the feasting Joseph conducted his wife to his homestead. And here the harpers and fiddlers who had still remained there since the day of the grandfather’s funeral played before the hall-doors as soon as the bride had entered the house, thus welcoming her with a burst of triumphant music. How could they do otherwise?

But they soon found out their mistake. “Just clear off the