Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/303

 When he wished to sell rye to the corn factor, he became aware that Joseph had already sold it underhand, when he thought that some samples might be left over the winter the merchant’s agents came and began to fill their carts with it, because Joseph had sold it also. And so now i’ faith I know not what still remained to old Loyka to testify that he was still master.

Such were the conditions amid which Frank grew up, and thus he began to feel ill at ease at home. Everything there was altered and in confusion. After his grandfather’s funeral he had led Staza about the courtyard and showed her where his grandfather had once dwelt, and which was the abode of the kalounkar (tape pedlar) and strolling fiddlers—but now all must be re-christened.

Into those chambers he had conducted Staza when he had invited her to the farm, and they had still remained almost untouched since the banishment of their previous occupants, here he and Staza could still feel at home, just as when they seated themselves in a grave at the cemetery. Here they could tell over to one another all the stories they knew, and thus story-telling was still not wholly banished from the farm. It had dwindled to the youngest member of the family, and to a most modest audience.

Sometimes Staza was the teller of the story and Frank formed the audience, at other times Frank was the narrator and Staza the listener.