Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/251



often tried to remember what had been the beginning of it. There was first the silence of long, uneventful years: days of no importance, months without incidents, a passionate longing for life, for something to happen. Sometimes life begins in this way, sometimes it ends thus. For him it had been ordained that the day on which a strange thing happened should become the first of many strange days.

The beginning of it had been an early spring day with all the rested impulses ready to break forth and spring up; when the earth opens her bosom, and yesterday’s rain clothes the fields in their first pale green.

It was a Sunday. Martin, the underforester, walking up the hillside behind his lodge, met Jurko the fool, who was coming down from somewhere in the hills. His real name was Jurek Prohabác, and as a rule he was to be found preaching sermons to the $235$