Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/20

 solo in the gloria expressly for him; and when Venik played, people at church turned their eyes to the gallery instead of looking at the altar. But no one could see him from below, he was still so small that he scarcely touched the rail of the gallery with his head. Then year after year the head emerged just over the rail, but the violin was yet invisible from below.

So then pretty early next morning Venik drove off the sheep to the hillside below the wood, and took with him his violin. Below the hillside murmured a river, on the hillside began to murmur the oakwood. Venik skirted the wood, and at the edge of it he noticed a single old tree whose trunk was hollow, so that four people could comfortably seat themselves inside. This tree looked as though it had stepped out from the wood. It had a sort of door and threshold; on the threshold, beside the entrance, squatted Venik, that he might look after the sheep, and he said to himself “Here I like to be: beside this tree I shall remain.”

When he had sat thus a short time and saw how the river fled away below him, and how the sheep kept creeping over the hillside, and how the wood behind him kept murmuring so softly, something stirred within him like the river, and something murmured softly like the woodland.

But when birds began to call to one another from the wood, Venik thought that he ought to answer them. He took his violin to make them some response.