Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/53

 After that piece, if they had implored any one of the masters and mistresses of the several homesteads to be their father and mother, not one of them would have reflected a moment but would have led them away and treated them as their own children. They might have asked what they chose, and they would not have appealed in vain.

They had already no need to feel any anxiety about victuals. They were at once taken to a house, and on the morrow some ane else asked them out, and on the following day some one else; and so they could be a whole week here just as at home. Every ne felt that they were not mere strolling musicians; Venik and Krista were just like their own children to them, and were treated royally.

Early on the morrow they again accompanied the young people of the village to school; after school, they accompanied them home, and in the village this seemed to be accepted as the natural order of things. Never in their lives before had the young people gathered so willingly to school, and never in their lives had they marched so merrily from school.

On the Sunday our young musicians asked to be allowed to play and sing in chapel, and Lord! how completely people forgot to look at the altar and fixed their eyes upon the gallery.

When in days gone by they had sung and played thus in the chapel of their native village, people, when they talked about “these children”, were quite accustomed to them. Here people heard them for the first time, and also heard such playing and singing for the first time. That Sunday they might have selected whichever farm they pleased to sup at; plates were laid for them at every house.

It was fortunate for these young souls, at this period of their lives, that strangers treated them as if they were of their own family and at home.

Possibly, if things had fallen out otherwise, they would have lost their way and ended in filth and obscurity, out of which there is no means of extrication. But as it was, they never stumbled on to the false track to ruin; their path led them otherwither.

The fame of the young musicians spread rapidly. The young people of neighbouring parishes also desired to be accompanied to and from school with music; an invitation was sent, and when Venik and Krista departed from the place where they had begun their musical pilgrimage, young and old escorted them a good Rh