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very same evening as many reports sprang up among the cottagers as there are blades of grass on a green bank between two fields. Young Kozman, having come home to his mother all out of breath, told her he had been to fetch the priest from Suchdol, because “something dreadfully particular” had happened at his house in Záluží. Mother Kozmanová ran with the piping-hot news to neighbour Vavrová, who in her turn went to Vavrus̓ková, and before nightfall the whole village was brimful with the news. A most extraordinarily feverish activity of mind set in at Záluz̓í. What “dreadfully particular thing” could it have been?

The soot could not have caught fire in the chimney, because there was nothing like that to be seen; and a thief as not very likely, either, to have broken into Father Cvok’s house, where there was nothing to be found but books—and books, every one knows, are not attractive to burglars.

Some curious people even went so far as to go round and round the priest’s house and the church—as a cat will go round a hot dish; but the house and church looked just as they always did. In the windows there was light as usual, only the blinds were down; otherwise