Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/307

 left over the winter the merchant’s agents came and began to fill their carts with it, because Joseph had sold it also. And so now i’ faith I know not what still remained to old Loyka to testify that he was still master.

Such were the conditions amid which Frank grew up, and thus he began to feel ill at ease at home. Everything there was altered and in confusion. After his grandfather’s funeral he had led Staza about the court-yard and showed her where his grandfather had once dwelt, and which was the abode of the kalounkar [tape-pedlar] and strolling fiddlers—but now all must be rechristened.

Into those chambers he had conducted Staza when he had invited her to the farm, and they had still remained almost untouched since the banishment of their previous occupants, here he and Staza could still feel at home, just as when they seated themselves in a grave at the cemetery. Here they could tell over to one another all the stories they knew, and thus story-telling was still not wholly banished from the farm. It had dwindled to the youngest member of the family; and to a most modest audience.

Sometimes Staza was the teller of the story and Frank formed the audience, at other times Frank was the narrator und Staza the listener.

The growing difference between father and son had one advantage for Frank, if we can call it an advantage, viz., that Frank was pretty well overlooked by both of them, and being left to himself might draw profit from this freedom. That is to say he might so far profit himself, that he need not be a witness of all that took place in the farm, might wander at will through the fields, might go to the cemetery for Staza, and lead her wherever he choose.

We are not among those who think that home is always the best place for children. On the contrary, it is frequently the greatest blessing for a child if he be freed from the fetters of home and be left to mother Nature and her relation-chance, that they may develop what home cannot impart, and what, indeed, it often thoroughly perverts.

These children, at all events, found together away from home what at home they had lacked. Nature and chance lovingly made good to them the deficiencies of home life. We mean by Nature the apparition of the heavens, and we mean by chance Heaven’s