Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/369

 “I thank you, neighbours, most respectfully. Leave me any place where there is no farmstead, and I have enough for my poor wants.”

If there was a cross anywhere on the village green, Loyka posted himself beside it, and when the people began to flock around him, he pointed to the Christus, and said “Here ye behold him,” and then he pointed to himself, and said “and here ye behold me.” “He yonder bore his cross only once to Calvary, but I bear mine continually. But the hangman’s servants martyred him, me my own son martyred because I gave him my estate.”

At other times again he cried “Wherefore do ye wonder that I go from village to village? Here ye behold a man crucified upon a cross! he also wandered about in the world and no one hindered him. Why do ye hinder me.”

Also Frank led his father away into the woodland, and once a fiddler whom they happened to meet at the outskirts of the wood accompanied them to the well-known ravines. Never in its life, perhaps, had that rocky glen entertained such a fantastic group as it did that day, and, perhaps, never in their lives did such tones reverberate from its rocky walls as did that day.

Even old Loyka felt as though he were seated in the chambers by the coach house at his home, and listened to the old, old, stories. Only that on this occasion it was Frank who narrated his youthful