Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/49

 terrible. The people knew the song, but never in all their lives had they heard it sound as it did then. They seemed to be hearing it for the first time; they seemed to hear in it tones completely new; no one had a suspicion that it contained a fund of pathos such as no one could resist. In the tones of our musician that song was heard in all its grandeur, aye, in majesty, and every heart was rent.

After that piece, if they had implored anyone of the masters and mistresses of the several homesteads to be their father and mother, not one of them would have reflected a moment but would have led them away and treated them as their own children. They might have asked what they chose, and they would not have appealed in vain.

They had already no need to feel any anxiety about victuals. They were at once taken to a house, and on the morrow someone else asked them out, and on the following day someone else; and so they could be a whole week here just as at home. Every one felt that they were not mere strolling musicians; Venik and Krista were just like their own children to them, and were treated royally.

Early on the morrow they again accompanied the young people of the village to school; after school, they accompanied them home, and in the village this seemed to be accepted as the natural order of things. Never in their lives before had the young people gathered so willingly to school, and never in