Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/427

 little fellow which Staza took from Annette that she might proudly exhibit it.

“Why am I made so strong, I wonder,” Bartos would say, “if I may not fling you off.” And he pretended jestingly to drive them before him that he might free himself from them. But it was worst of all when he prepared to depart. Here even old Loyka fastened on him, and all held him, that he should still remain with them. And here Bartos, the gravedigger, for a time feigned to chivy them away, just as though he would shake them off. And we must say what then happened, seldom happened—it being the only occasion when the Herculean Bartos succumbed. Frank, Staza, Loyka, and the little boy overpowered him, and sometimes the little boy alone prevailed.

“Well, well,” laughed old Loyka, and then when at even the musicians came there was in the farm a most charming idyll.

Long had they sought this idyll, long had they wandered in search of it, but they found it at last. And this idyll ends as it began—

odpocinte v pokoji