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172 Jasinski, and there with his switch he performed prodigies of valour. Everybody knew how he had jumped down alone from the ramparts of Praga to defend Pan Pociej, who had been deserted on the field of battle and had received twenty-three wounds. In Lithuania they long thought that both had been killed; but both returned, each as full of holes as a sieve. Pan Pociej, an honourable man, immediately after the war had wished to reward generously his defender Dobrzynski; he had offered him for life a farm of five houses, and assigned him yearly a thousand ducats in gold. But Dobrzynski wrote back: "Let Pociej remain in debt to Maciej, and not Maciej to Pociej." So he refused the farm and would not take the money; returning home alone, he lived by the work of his own hands, making hives for bees and medicine for cattle, sending to market partridges which he caught in snares, and hunting wild beasts.

In Dobrzyn there were numbers of sagacious old men—men versed in Latin, who from their youth up had practised at the bar; there were numbers of richer men: but of all the family the poor and simple Maciek was the most highly honoured, not only as a swordsman made famous by his switch, but as a man of wise and sure judgment, who knew the history of the country and the traditions of the family, and was equally well versed in law and farming. He knew likewise the secrets of hunting and of medicine; they even ascribed to him (though this the priest denied) a knowledge of higher, superhuman things. This much is sure, that he knew with precision the changes of the weather, and could guess them oftener than the farmer's almanac. It is no marvel then that, whether it was a question of beginning the sowing, or of sending out the river barges, or of reaping the grain; whether it was a matter of going to