Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/300

 and trampled under foot, is distorted into what is unnatural and monstrous. The law allows that sons should take upon themselves the part of criminals, and the sons wittingly, ay, hanging their heads in shame the while, hasten to adapt themselves to the criminal’s vocation: custom and habit consecrate the deed, and baffled nature loses here even her power of speech.

But to our tale. The harvest home at the Loykas’ passed as gloomily as Ash-Wednesday. In the farm house there was not a cheerful face, the old folks shunned the young, the young couple avoided the old ones. They never looked at one another if they could help it, nor, if they could avoid it did they speak to another. And if they did look at one another or spoke to one another they neither returned the look nor listened with the least satisfaction.

Just as in years gone by the harvesters used to gather eagerly to the Loykas’, so this summer every moment they spent here was a torment to them. And they heartily thanked the Lord God when it was all over, and they might go thence. “I do not come here again,” they said to one another. “Not if I have to look for work I know not in what village.”

It is true puncheons of ale were rolled into the courtyard for their behoof, and they were given a glass or two of rosolek, but not a single face dis-